Dear reader, I must apologize not only for my weak introduction  to the life of my dear and yet strange friend Daniel Williams but also for my inability to adequately express in words my own personal fascination with the man. I will make a confession to you and that is that I cannot in words express my true feelings about much of anything anymore, that is due in part to my progressing dissatisfaction with life in general to my ill-got case of syphilis while in Rangoon in particular.  I must tell you that my observations, which I call Commentarius Perpetuus, are based on two elements. One, my personal adventures with Daniel and second, on a journal I found of his a less than one year ago, buried at the bottom of a molded box of dusty paperback editions of French and German philosophy and an autographed copy of the February 1967 edition of Playboy magazine. My companion had slowly become more and more withdrawn from actual life. In the last year I knew him he had suffered dearly from mounting personal and legal debts and an increasing dependence on drink. And as we know, drink in the form of intemperance can become a most fearsome disease. I had lost contact with Daniel when I had to convalesce after a serious accident befell me while on a reporting assignment in the Andes Mountains, researching on a dig of some two thousand infant mummies. I was accidentally mistaken for a spider monkey while urinating behind a jungle bush and was shot in the scrotum by a poisonous blow dart. I will skip the details dear reader, but I advise you to avoid the experience if at all possible. Upon my return to the Pacific Northwest I went to visit Daniel at the house he shared with a motley crew of social misfits, such as he himself had become, only to find that he had sold, gave away or discarded as rubbish all he owned and had left America for some obscure province in China, where legend now has it he lives a near ascetic existence, earning money by teaching and playing guitar in the subway stations.

    I was surprised but hardly stunned as I had seen in my friend the development of attitude that the existentialists would call the awareness of the absurd. He had come to stare into the abyss and only the abyss was staring back. I saw long ago he was entering what in my own papers on the subject I have come to call The Core Domain. A Hindu man who answered the door told me he knew Daniel well, and had become close friends with him, and said Daniel was the most spiritual and Godly man he ever knew, but that he also appeared to be demonically possesses so it caused complications. He went to a storage room on the lower level and returned with the aforementioned box. There was no note or instruction of what to do with the box. I was given charge of it and I took it back to my lodgings and opened a fine burgundy and lit a cigar and perused its contents. As I said, it contained what was left of his once voluminous personal library. Maybe twenty books (the Playboy excluded, which has since...er.. became separated from the other books in the box.) There was Fraser´s The Golden Bough, Nietzsche´s Will to Power, Arthur Schopenhauer´s  The World as Will and Idea. There were a few books of poetry by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Poe (of course), a Catholic Bible and a book on the life of the Buddha written by a Japanese monk. This was what my old chum, in the last moments, felt he could not live without I suppose. As I flipped over the books I chanced to see a journal style notebook, it was of the style of which Daniel once had dozens, totaling thousands of pages. Where were the rest? And why is this the only one that remained? It was sealed in a plastic bag, the type used to preserve rare comic books. I open the bag and saw that the original generic cover has been colored black with India Ink, and I opened to the first page, in a a neat and even blocked faced handwriting, one I recognized immediately, was written the title of the journal my life weary compatriot saw fit to rescue fro his purge. It was a Latin term, and I knew it from my friend´s interest in Soren Kierkegaard. It meant on running commentary, and I sat back in my chair, puffed on my cigar, and sipped my dark wine and stared at the title page of  his last journal: Commentarius Perpetuus.