Alan Fallaize
In the year of Sophia the Wise, 83 AE
St. Vitus’s College
Foreword To SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY
by Professor Devindra Vale
Years ago, before the civil war that presently devastates our country—before, even, the fatal events that led to it—it was my honor to be tasked by our first queen, Lily the Silent, to undertake the immense task of restructuring our educational system. A task indeed! But one which all in Arcadia were aware had been long overdue.
It took more than thirty years. Those of us on the committee were young and idealistic, but by the end of the process we were old. Both Lily the Silent and her daughter the Great Queen, Sophia the Wise, were dead, and our country stood at the brink of disaster. This disaster, we now know with the benefit of hindsight, could have been prevented. But we were blind.
It is the vocation and the duty of the educator to educate. To what purpose? This would seem obvious: to provide a better life for the community. Yet this did not seem obvious to us when we began this task. It does not seem obvious to some of us now.
As is well known, there was one point on which, after laborious research and exhaustive discussion, we all agreed. All of us, scientists, historians, classicists, rhetoricians, mathematicians, and theologians involved in the New Subjectivity, for too long and quite artificially had divided up the world into the parts that formed our disciplines. A series of discoveries in both the sciences and the arts (see Prof. Chloe Watson, An Elegant Theory of the Contiguity of Theater Arts and Neurobiology [year 14]; Prof. Joyanna Bender Boyce-Flood, History or Physics: A False Dichotomy [year 17 after the Heavy Rains] and Journey to the Center of an Illusion [year 25]; Dr. Malcolm Sivia, Connection: A Personal Journey of Discovery, Love, and Loss [year 59], and many more) proved beyond a doubt the essential unity of our world. And this discovery comes in spite of—or perhaps because of—the determined opposition of the followers of Prof. Aspern Grayling (Twelve Points Against the Existence of Unity [year 41]). Alas that the search for truth should have been subordinate to political considerations, but perhaps this is always so, in every world. Perhaps this, too, is a biological truth. It deserves more study, and all of us, all New Subjectivists, should be grateful to the Neofundamentalist school for providing us a whetstone on which to sharpen our thought. And we have thought. We have thought, and we have discovered.
We have discovered through hard data that by studying the world by its parts we had missed the larger truth of its whole. But this discovery may have come too late. There are many who believe that we work in an Ivory Tower that has nothing to do with politics or international affairs. But the new discoveries disprove this. As is usual, the cautious and precise work of the academic world goes too fast for the so-called Men and Women of Action.
If we are too fast for them, we have always been too slow for the world of art. Another key discovery of the First Reign, the key discovery, was this now well-known fact: stories, especially those told to children, hold the greatest secrets of our universe. This is a point I need not belabor, it having been so often and so definitively proved, most concisely in Dr. Alan Fallaize’s classic work, On the Discovery of Biological Truths in Fairy Tales (year 61). (Note: see particularly his work on the biological need for equity.)
I myself have spent the last sixty years of my career studying these stories. Of late, my studies and my theorizing have taken on an urgency they lacked in more peaceful times. Long hours, late nights, spent poring over the most ancient texts to be found in the libraries of such bastions of Arcadian civilization as Mumford, Eopolis, Amaurote, and, of course, Wrykyn, have led me to believe, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the only possible solution to our present social breakdown is to be found in the old books. The Legendus Snottianicus, found in fragments in the archives of Eisler Hall and translated by Prof. Bender Boyce-Flood, hinted that it held a key. When it was discovered that the copy of SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY found in the library of Sophia the Wise after her death was a whole, translated version of the same legend, I knew it needed study of the most profound kind. I have attempted such a study.
Expecting little response from a population in an uproar of xenophobia, fundamentalism, and obsession with a sterile technology (alas that my Neofundamentalist colleagues are included in this condemnation), I nevertheless have decided to publish my findings. No attention will be paid now. But the book will be done, will be distributed in no matter how limited an academic manner, will be there. It will be there for the next generation, no matter how battered, maimed, and small, to read, to use as another tool in the onerous task of digging themselves out of the mire to which we, the present custodians of Arcadia, have led them. The thought of this goes some small way to assuaging the awful guilt that keeps me awake most nights of what should have been a tranquil old age.
If it is not tranquil, it is my own fault.
I should have seen. I should have known. I should have spoken. But, like the rest of us, I was a coward. I was afraid to be wrong. I was afraid to be laughed at. I was afraid to be seen as a fool.
No more.
Here, then, is SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY, long thought to be a minor work by an unknown writer, a story not entirely successful, mainly because of the horrid nature of the hero, the Snotty in question. He is a repellent brat, and what little criticism there has been of this till now mostly ignored work has focused on the difficulty of relating to such a child as the protagonist.
Subsequent scholarship has found, unsettlingly, that it is just the story of this child that is the foundation myth of Arcadia. Just as—in another world we’ve discovered lies close to our own—Romulus and Remus founded Rome, as King Arthur lies at the bottom of the story of their England, so Snotty is at the bottom of our story. What happens to him is what happened to us.
This is the place to say I suspect more. What I suspect, but cannot yet prove, would rock our foundation. And can I, despite my duties as a scholar, take that responsibility? It is difficult, if not impossible to know. What I will say here is: Snotty is Arcadia. Until we know him, we do not know ourselves. Until we know ourselves, we can never free ourselves from the cycle of vengeance and terror that ravages our once beautiful land.
My heart is heavy with sadness for Arcadia as I read the final proofs of SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY, the book that is, in truth, the first book in the history of Arcadia. The footnotes are meant to be of use to my academic colleagues in further research, but may be ignored by the merely curious reader who wants to see what happens next in the story.
I urge the reader: don’t give up on Snotty. His adventures prove that if even one person knows who he or she really is, whole worlds can change. Ours did.
And I urge my colleagues: continue the research. It may be, even, that the study of SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY and of other folk and fairy tales might lead to the answer to the one great remaining question of Arcadian science—why it is that our history begins only eighty-one years ago, and why even those who lived in the time before that have no clear idea of the sequence of events before that time. This has always been the puzzle, of the type that ambitious graduate students dream of solving, and that is ignored, perhaps in frustration, by older and wiser scientists. Who knows but that an answer to this strange conundrum may be found, as so many other truths have been found, in fairy tales and legends such as these. Who knows what answers to other, even more intractable, problems might not be discovered through finding the true solution. I urge my colleagues, all my students, don’t cease looking for the truth! I will do what I can, but my time is running out. Already, tonight, in my tower at Wrykyn, overlooking the Lily Pond, I can hear the explosions coming near—too near. And I am very tired.
My thanks, as always, to the Senior Common Room of St Vitus’s College, Otterbridge University, and especially to Dr. Alan Fallaize, Professor Malcolm Sivia, and Professor Joyanna Bender Boyce-Flood. And to my beloved great-granddaughter Shiva Todhunter: may the landscapes you paint be peaceful in the future, and may you teach my great-great-granddaughter Devindra the ways of Sophia the Wise.
Professor Devindra Vale