The Evangelical Universalist Forum

CoJ: Preface

Studies Books
#1

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My wife, my beloved;
I promise.
I can explain.
I can explain where I went. And why.
I can explain why I didn’t explain, when I returned.
I didn’t explain…because I was afraid.
Our duties require us to be apart, sometimes—as you yourself are gone. Always we have kept in touch, even when apart.
But . . . this time I could *not *do so. Not because a power prevented me; but . . . because . . .

  • . . . how can I explain . . . ?*

I wanted to tell you. You deserve to know, because you love me. But I couldn’t find the courage—and now you are gone.
And you refuse to keep in touch this time.
I deserve no better.

But, how to tell you . . . how to explain . . .
so much pain and horror and death . . .
and I am responsible . . .

I brought back books from that world. I tried to save something.
I needed to find a place to begin.
I met people there. This is their story—the story that I am responsible for destroying.
They never knew that, of course. I never told them.

There is one who suffered most. She also was responsible—for terrible things. She *also *wrote a confession.
I will begin with her story. And I see another I met; who is also part of her story. Good.

I will follow their history, then; using her book and those of others to guide my search. It won’t take long, by our standards—I can write it in a day; you can read it in an hour.

I am a coward. I rather would tell you a story of them—

than simply to tell you the truth.

But, I promise: you shall have the truth.

In this life, or in the next.

Next chapter

CoJ: Introduction -- To A World
#2

Notes from the real author… :mrgreen:

The main narrator of this book (and its sequels) is himself a fictional character of the story. I’ll reserve the first post of a thread for the chapter material, so any posts you see from me in the same thread afterward are really me and not the main authorial character. :wink:

For public (and most private) discussion purposes, I always refer to the main author character as the Preface Author or the PA for short. This is not how people refer to him in-story, but that will be dealt with much later. (Much, much, much, much later.)

Readers are welcome to give him another nickname as you wish; whatever makes things easier.

The forum engine doesn’t allow me to reproduce normal carriage returns and paragraph indentions; a problem made more problematic by the fact that I use unusual stylisms like metaparagraphs. Any double-carriage returns in the text here on the forum represent identical double-carriage returns in the text, not normal new paragraphs.

I may however adjust the reproduction on the forum later to add visible carriage returns for every new paragraph and a further carriage return for metaparagraphs, depending on how things look once I start dealing in longer paragraphs. I just thought I should explain the odd look here meanwhile.