The Abyss of Human Illusion

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The Abyss of Human Illusion was begun by my father in October 2003, and a first draft was mostly complete when he was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2005. Both the disease and its treatment rapidly incapacitated him, and he had little physical or intellectual energy available to sit at his desk and work. Despite this, he did work throughout his final months to complete what he referred to matter-of-factly as “my last book,” finishing it a few weeks before his death in May 2006. At the time, he provided me with a typescript, heavily corrected and with marginal notations, consisting of the main sections of the novel, as well as a composition notebook in which he’d drafted in longhand the brief glosses on these sections, which together comprise the book in its entirety.

In preparing the manuscript for publication, I encountered one immediate problem. As his strength faded, my father’s handwriting (somewhat difficult to read under the best of circumstances) deteriorated to the point of near illegibility. Determining his intentions was made more difficult by his habitually precise, but not necessarily consistent or orthodox, approach to punctuation, typography, and so forth — the minutiae most commonly in question. Less frequently, although more problematically, I came across indecipherable words and phrases. Often these became clear in context, or were repeated elsewhere more legibly, and thus were easily transcribed. In some instances, though, I have taken an educated guess, drawing on my familiarity with my father’s work and verbal mannerisms. I found these to be relatively simple decisions, although doubtless there are some presumptuous flaws in my leaps of conjecture.

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