IX

One fine day, a novelist of titanic literary prowess and universally admired cogitative abilities, the most renowned man of letters of his time, perhaps all times, had, having conceived and cultivated to near fruition a fiction of unsurpassably imaginative and philosophic genius concerning a certain war and, crucially, a certain battlefield, set forth in his most regal of barouches, readied with alacrity and great care by his sagacious, well powdered porter, to inquire of the battlefield’s groundskeeper, having, despite his towering genius, to concede to the vulgar necessity of reality which demanded the incorporation of certain elements of factual historicity into his fiction, to find that, no more than a month ago, the ancient caretaker and sole witness to the relevant battle had surveyed the sun rising over the killing fields of the past, green and golden, resplendent with morning dew, a final and wistful time, before ignobly and inconsideratelyabsconding to unknown depths in the surrounding woods, where he died prior to consulting the novelist of titanic literary prowess.