The Narrator of All Three Books
The narrator of my novel, The Logic of Limitless, is the pre-socratic* philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and I chose to make the letter writer of Thank You, Mr. Darwin named after him by his eccentric father.
*Pre-socratic is a misnomer as Anaxagoras and Socrates were both alive during the greater part of their lives.
As the actual author I use fictional narrators because it surprises me that Limitation Philosophy is a “NEW” thing. Aspects of the philosophy, such as non-anthropomorphism, are timeless, but I have never heard of anyone in the past putting the organic system that emerges to use into a synergistic understanding of God and man. Out of respect for the integrity of Limitation Philosophy I’m surprised someone did not discover it far sooner, in ancient times perhaps.
In the narrative timeline of my fiction’s progression the Logic of Limitless is the final work of the narrator Anaxagoras Pen, but in actual writing it proceeded both Thank You, Mr. Darwin and Ockham’s Epiphany.
The Logic of Limitless does not appear to even have a narrator, but a careful reading shows that the only mention of any internal feeling is in the character, Anaxagoras. It’s minimal and that was deliberate. Anaxagoras is a scientist writing history exactly as it happened. He would have operated on the principle of how any character, including himself, feels is irrelevant.
During the pre-socratic philosopher Anaxagoras’ life a meteor fell to earth (467 bc) and he studied it. So the mention of a meteor in the Britannica article on Atoms written by J. Clerk Maxwell would have caught the Letter Writer’s eye, since he would know the story about his namesake and the meteor.
A contemporary of Thucydides, Anaxagoras, while narrating the Logic of Limitless as a story, would have been capable of even greater objectivity than Thucydides, and had greater access to the persons he was writing about. Thucydides writes:
With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said. And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labor from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.
Thucydides book 1:22
Logic of Limitless was the first of the three books and when I was naming the ‘Letter Writer’ in Thank You, Mr. Darwin I chose to make his namesake the pre-socratic philosopher Anaxagoras. It was auspicious to his greater role as narrator and it seemed like the kind of name a dramatic person like his father would bestow onto his son.
So Anaxagoras Pen was born.
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