Lacond, for all of his faults, understood this about Duncan. (After all, he, like me, had been underground at least once or twice, and came away from it having paid a physical price.) In one issue of the newsletter, Lacond wrote:

When Duncan Shriek writes about the Silence—as he has been known to do within these very pages—he quite literally, in my opinion, writes also of his personal silences over the years, the way in which he has been silenced—by others, by his own mistakes—and all the similar silences, suffered by us all. In a sense, he has made Ambergris’s history personal. He may be too good a historian to invade his text, but certain parallels emerge again and again—allusions to Tonsure’s descent into silence and despair and subsequent reemergence in the form of a book being especially prevalent.

Those experts who bothered to refute Duncan’s theories—mostly Sabon—pointed to the dangers of the personal history approach. Sabon wrote an essay for the H&S collection Impersonal Perspectives: Objectivity in Ambergrisian History (which probably sold about five copies):

The irrefutable fissure in any theory of “personal history” lies in the impulse to find a plateau far above sheer fact, to reveal a lesson or universal “truth” that can be mapped to an individual life and intertwined with a complicated intellectual disdain: contempt for accuracy, rejection of contradictory evidence, confusion of conjecture with truth, resistance to correction.

Sabon had a point, of sorts. Not that Duncan’s theories were flawed—no one ever dared to test their veracity through underground research. But when Duncan began, a few years later, to write his Early History, he looked to what he was writing for some indication of how to live his life, so that instead of finding what in history could become personal, he let the personal become history. (You might be right, but the reading public never had a chance to discover the truth or falsehood of it, either in the book or in reality.)

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the parallels that Duncan sought did not always exist. As I told him once, “Nothing in your studies will ever explain the death of our father.” I don’t think he believed me. He would have believed me even less if I had told him Bonmot and Truffidianism might be able to help him with that mystery. (Of all your incarnations, your transformation to the cause of organized religion baffled me the most. I certainly didn’t begrudge you your conversion, though—all I envied was the time you spent with Bonmot.)

I’ve finally found something personal of Dad’s in among all the dry discourse—tucked away inside a box inside another box. A canvas sculpture of a mushroom, about twelve inches tall. Part of his personal history, you might call it, and the symbol of a rare hiccup in the respect my parents showed each other.