I was well aware of the existence of Dr. Manfred Lowenstein, Ph.D. long before I met him. This was due to his early work in the field of mathematics. It was quite incomprehensible to me, but so groundbreaking that his reputation long preceded him. He was also well known, in some cases infamous, as one of the few academics who professed some measure of religious observance, which was unusual to say the least, given the atheism that prevails in such institutions.
I have heard that I was not alone in my incomprehension of Lowenstein’s most famous theories. There were at best a few dozen people in the world who could comprehend them in full. Nonetheless, even partial comprehension was sufficient for myriad practical applications, which were rumored to be in part military, something about which he appeared to have no particular qualms.
I met him for the first time on the sidelines of an academic gathering at the university on the outskirts of our little city, where he had been domiciled for several decades. Despite the festive atmosphere, he was uncommunicative and unresponsive to most entreaties, of which there were many due to his considerable reputation. He appeared content to stand in a corner with a drink in his hand—which he seemed never to actually drink—and fend off his admirers. He would manage a few words of salutation and then send them on their way, most of them no doubt disappointed at the indifference of the great man.
I received much the same treatment when a colleague introduced us. Lowenstein showed little interest in me or my work, though his eyebrows rose when he was told my specialty. Nonetheless, we too were sent on our way in short order. We acquiesced without resentment and left him to his own devices, as he seemed to prefer.
For over two years, I had no occasion to recall even the name of Manfred Lowenstein, until the rumors began to spread. They were all to the effect that the professor’s eccentricities had grown severe. While he continued to teach sporadic seminars for his most gifted students, his work on the Weisberg Theorem appeared to have ceased and he had published no papers for longer than anyone could remember, a disturbing fact given his prolific early career and the immense importance given to publication in today’s academia.
Some wondered whether Lowenstein had hit the proverbial wall. Mathematicians, along with physicists and scientists in general, have the uncanny tendency to publish their most significant breakthroughs before the age of 30. After that, it is, for the most part, a wash. The paradigmatic example was Albert Einstein, who spent the last several decades of his life in denial of quantum mechanics and in pursuit of a “theory of everything” that, in all likelihood, does not exist. Many suspected the same disease particular to geniuses had afflicted Lowenstein.
Nonetheless, there was much speculation that it might just be possible that Lowenstein had been at work on some enormous thing for all this time. It might even be a “great work” that would reveal the famous unknown theory of everything.
I put most of these speculations down to simple gossip that confirmed once more the old adage that academic disputes are so bitter because the stakes are so small. My relative indifference was shattered, however, on an early spring day when I found myself in conversation with Lowenstein himself.
The call came in the late afternoon and I was irritated by the ring, as it disturbed my plans for a nap. My resentment disappeared when I heard the unmistakable voice with its thick Russian accent.
“It’s Lowenstein,” said the voice, without preamble.
“Yes, I know,” I replied.
There was a long silence, as if he were confused. Perhaps he did not know his voice was so recognizable.
“There’s an issue,” he said.
“I see,” I replied.
“A subject.”
“Yes?”
“It’s difficult.”
“Difficult?”
“To fully describe. To convey appropriately in this particular context.”
“Context?”
“In this particular forum.”
“I see.”
“Can you meet tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes,” he emphasized in a firm voice. “Tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Oh,” he said, as if the thought had not occurred to him. “My office. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes. Tomorrow. Definitely. Definitely tomorrow.”
I waited for him to say something more, but there was only silence.
“Alright,” I said.
“Good, thank you,” he replied, and hung up.
A few minutes later, I realized he had given me no specific hour for our meeting. I considered calling him back, but concluded that a) it was almost certain that he wouldn’t answer, and b) it was probable that he didn’t much care when I arrived, so long as I made an appearance.
The entire issue became irrelevant when I checked the university website and discovered that his office was open to visitors for only two hours, three days a week. I decided to arrive with a half-hour to spare, as the rest of the time would be monopolized by anxious students, and I had no desire to spend my time in his waiting room.
“You’re late,” he said, when he opened his office door the next day. I chose not to object, and mumbled something about not wanting to interfere with his students.
“I don’t meet with students,” he said, which was a very strange thing for a professor to say and, I presumed, untrue.
He sat down behind his metal desk, ran a hand through his yellow-stained gray beard and lit a cigarette. I was well aware of the university’s regulations against indoor smoking, but I did not object. I sat down across from him and, for quite some time, he said nothing. Then he opened a drawer and placed a large, leather-bound book on the desk before me.
I waited for him to say something by way of explanation, but again nothing came. At last, he made an ambiguous gesture toward the book, and I decided that if I did not open it, we would sit in silence forever, so I did so.
The volume’s age was obvious at first glance, but it was in excellent condition and had been kept with considerable care. It was not dated, though there was something like a title page. I judged by the manuscript-style orthography that it was printed in the early 18th century, if not somewhat before.
I realized then that this was something that might be very valuable indeed, so it was with considerable trepidation that I began to turn the pages and glance over the small, square letters and the occasional colorful but always abstract illustration, most of them geometrical patterns in various vivid colors. There appeared to be nothing unusual about the book at all, except for its obvious antiquity.
“Well?” I asked.
Lowenstein brushed aside a cloud of smoke and replied, “Read it.”
I lowered my eyes to the page and examined the square letters with much greater attention. After a moment, I confessed, “I can’t.”
“No,” he said. “Neither can I.”
“Is it another language written in…”
“I’m not certain. I’ve ruled out a Semitic tongue and most of the Romance languages, but Latin or Greek is still possible.”
“A code? A cipher?”
“That’s the most likely explanation. Or, at least, it’s been the most popular for several centuries.”
“It’s definitely genuine, then?”
“Oh yes. The provenance is well established.”
“Italy?”
“Yes, probably Venice, possibly Rome.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s listed in the 1656 catalogue of Giacomo Benedetti’s library as printed in Venice two years before, but that hasn’t been verified.”
“I see.”
“Hence the name.”
“The name?”
“In interested circles. It’s known as the Benedetti Manuscript. Has been for 300 years.”
“Did Benedetti create it? Or have it created?”
“It’s possible. Likely, even. But there’s no proof.” He lit another cigarette. “It shows up again in Munich in 1703 in the collection of one Heinrich Stemper. A baron of something-or-other. I can’t remember offhand. It’s referred to as ‘Benedetti Manuscript,’ bought in 1699.”
“And did he…?”
“No, that’s noted very clearly. There’s a diary entry dated 1709. He’d been working on it. He had some training in cryptography, which was already fairly advanced at the time.”
“Without success?”
“None whatsoever. He bequeathed his entire library to his son Joseph, who took it to Bonn with him. He seems to have showed it to several specialists without result.”
“I see.”
“From there, it was bought from Joseph’s son Tomas in 1810 by the Marquis de Monserrat. He kept it at his estate near Versailles until the Napoleonic wars. He sold it, presumably because he needed the cash, in 1841 to an English antiquarian named Arthur Bradford, the first earl of Mountbatten and a favorite of Queen Victoria. He probably showed it to her, hard to believe he didn’t, but there’s no record of it.”
“And he failed as well.”
“Completely. He even consulted several leading scholars at the British Museum. It defeated them all. There was talk then about selling it to the Bodleian Library, but Bradford ended up needing money as badly as Montserrat, so it went to the highest bidder.”
“Who was?”
“Vasily Friedman, a Polish Jew who owned four factories in and around Warsaw. His son Henrik inherited it in 1922. Then…”
“Then?”
“Henrik was a man of considerable foresight. He got out in time. The book was left to his son Stanislaw, who left it in turn to his first-born daughter, probably out of contrarianism.”
“And none of them…”
“They didn’t try, for the most part. It was an asset to them, not an object of any great interest.”
“I see.”
“All except for the daughter.”
“The daughter?”
“Sophie Friedman is far less bourgeois than her forebears, at least in mentality. She wants to complete the task undertaken by her predecessors.”
“I see. And with your talents in mathematics…”
“Yes. She thinks the key lies in numbers, assessments of probability and so forth. She’s very intent on decipherment. She hopes to see it before she dies.”
“How old is she?”
“Eighty-seven.”
“Not much time then.”
“No, probably not. Though her mother lived to 107.”
“Still, it’s been almost four centuries and… nothing at all?”
“Nothing. Not a single word has ever been understood. Claims have been made, of course, but all fairly quickly discredited. Mostly from sensation-seekers, to be honest. Pleas for attention. There were also a few obvious hoaxes, but that’s not particularly relevant.”
“I presume other experts have been consulted as well?”
“Oh yes. Medievalists, scholars of the Renaissance, cryptographers, all manner of my fellow mathematicians. Sophie Friedman even tried to enlist the CIA.”
“Really?”
“Yes, one analyst took an interest, but his conclusions were not encouraging.”
“And they were?”
Lowenstein sighed. “He concluded that the text appears meaningless because, in all probability, it is meaningless.”
“So, all this would be…”
“Gibberish. A mess of random letters. Nothing more.”
I fingered the dry pages. “It’s not impossible,” I said. “There was a very lucrative market in rare and unusual books in the 16th and 17th centuries. Still is, for that matter. Someone could very well have written an incomprehensible book for precisely that reason. It creates an aura of mystery that drives up the price. I’m sure Monserrat, Friedman, and the rest paid a decent amount for it.”
“Sophie Friedman had it assessed at $5.2 million.”
I stared at him.
“And she just… let you have it?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Sophie Friedman is a very rich woman,” he said. “A little more or less is of no interest to her. What she wants is the solution.”
“I don’t understand rich people,” I said.
“I don’t either.”
“And you just… keep it in a drawer?” I asked. He looked at me like I had taken leave of my senses. I closed the book, as I had no desire to further sully $5.2 million, and said, “It’s a fascinating story but…”
“I’ve been working on it for six years.”
“Six years?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“So far, nothing.”
I thought about that for a moment and wondered what genius must feel when it finds itself frustrated by the inexplicable.
“Nothing at all?” was all I could think to say.
“No, apparently not.” He paused for a moment. “Well, that’s not exactly true. I’m pretty certain it’s a language of some kind. There’s no indication of absolute randomness. At least none that I can see. It’s also not a substitution cipher or the like, unless it’s an extremely sophisticated one. It’s possible it was written to a very complex and unique key, which has since been lost. In which case…”
“It’ll never be solved.”
“Probably not, but I’m not prepared to concede that just yet. There’s also the possibility of…”
“An artificial language.”
“Yes, precisely. It’s not impossible. There’s precedent.”
“True,” I said. “There’s Berkoff’s mathematical alphabet, Dee’s tongue of the angels, and that’s just the 16th century. Of course, the writer would have to be some kind of transcendent genius, so it’s not very likely…”
“Transcendent genius isn’t as unusual as people think. Look at physics: Einstein, Feynman, Fermi, Hawking, Bohr, and so on… all within a few decades of each other, with considerable overlap.”
“True,” I said. I sat back in my chair and was lost in thought for a moment. Then I opened the book to a random page and examined the square letters again.
“Some of the words are quite long,” I noted, “which indicates that, despite the orthography, it’s probably not a Semitic language. I think you’re right about that. It does appear vaguely alphabetic, probably not an abjad. The word length does seem a bit short for Germanic—if it is Indo-European—so it’s probably Latin or some variation of Sanskrit, and Greek is certainly a decent candidate, but…”
“If it’s artificial…”
“Then all bets are off.”
“Exactly.”
Neither of us said anything for quite some time.
“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” he said.
“We?”
“If you agree.”
“I’m sorry, agree to what?”
“I was hoping you’d be willing to assist me.”
I was, I admit, quite startled. “I’m afraid mathematics…”
“Yes, I know that, obviously, but it is a historical artifact, which is well within your purview.”
“True.”
He looked at me very intently for a moment, and by reflex, I evaded the gaze of his luminous orbs.
“You don’t like the idea,” he said.
“No,” I replied.
“Why not?”
“Well… it’s a bit of a rabbit hole, isn’t it?”
“A rabbit hole?”
“Yes. A maze, a cul-de-sac, a bottomless pit…” He raised his hand to indicate that he understood. “My point is: This is the kind of thing people disappear into.”
“I see,” he said.
“There are some mysteries…”
“Yes, yes,” he said in a dismissive tone, “but the mystery is the whole point.”
I nodded slowly. He was, after all, correct. “I suppose,” I said, “that I can make some preliminary inquiries. Just go over the currently accepted facts. Confirm or not, as the case may be.”
“That would be fine,” he said. “There’s a little money in it as well. Sophie Friedman is a very generous woman with considerable resources at her disposal.”
“The best I can do is consult.”
“That’s fine. Name your fee and I’ll get back to you.”
“May I… take the book?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he replied. I was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment. I too, it seemed, was on the edge of the rabbit hole.
“Please send me your research,” I said.
“Of course.”
I waited for him to say something more, but he never did. I stood up, made a vague gesture of farewell, and took my leave of him.
A few hours later, he emailed me some 3,000 pages of various documents, of which at least 50 were in languages I could not understand, whether due to obscurity or age. The Benedetti Manuscript, I thought, is not so unusual. The incomprehensible is everywhere.
Nonetheless, there was more than enough to work with. Each evening, for several hours, I pored over the documents in an attempt to trace, or rather retrace, the history of the strange text. As the days went by, however, I found myself drawn more and more to the facsimile pages of the book itself. Lowenstein, I thought, had been prescient when he sent them to me. He must have known that the pages would exercise a certain mystique, as they had no doubt done to him and—one imagines—all the previous savants who had tried to unlock their secrets, at least those whose motives had not been mercenary.
Several times, I found myself staring for many minutes at those uncanny pages; the bizarre arrangements of the square letters; the words, or what appeared to be words, that seemed at times too long and other times too short to be genuine; the effortless and uniform printing, with its perfect spaces and margins, cut and inked with great care; and, in particular, the odd multicolored mandalas and labyrinths that illuminated the pages, abstracted down to the most basic geometry known to man, some of them no more than squares within squares and interlocking triangles. What were these shapes in aid of? I wondered. What were they an obscure attempt to say? If indeed they were intended to say anything at all.
As time passed, this was the question that began to trouble me above all others, and it hardened into a conviction. I am neither a linguist nor a mathematician, but I became more and more certain that when I perused those facsimile pages, my eyes beheld a hoax; that the arrangements of the square letters meant nothing; and the unknown author or authors had sought, not to create a text, but to create a mystery, and a lucrative one.
Nonetheless, I could prove nothing. I could not even find anything that had not already been found. I knew no more than Lowenstein knew. This, I feared, would disappoint him. I was surprised to discover this fear. For some unknown reason, I wanted to please this strange and eccentric man. Or perhaps I pitied him, because a disturbing possibility had occurred to me: He was six years deep in a mystery, and if my surmise was correct, he might not emerge. Lowenstein, I knew, was not a man to cede any ground to the unknowable. His entire being was knowledge. Without knowledge, he could not live.
It seemed possible, then, even likely, that Lowenstein would decipher the Benedetti or die trying, his work unfinished. But he would remain convinced to the end that the answer was there and someday one of his heirs might find it. If he believed otherwise, he would die unhappy. This was more than I, or anyone in my lamentable place, could stand. If I believed the Benedetti was a hoax, I would keep it to myself.
After five weeks, I contacted Lowenstein and told him that the manuscript had defeated me. I would accept a nominal fee for the time invested, but no more than that, given my failure to provide him with anything new to work with.
He did not sound surprised or otherwise disappointed. I sensed that, for him, I had been at best a peripheral character. I was the proverbial “shot in the dark” who might come up with something, but was, in the end, not very important. Of my own suspicions, indeed my own convictions, I said nothing whatsoever. I even gave him a few words of encouragement and best wishes for his eventual success.
I was, I admit, unsettled by this. I had already concluded that Lowenstein’s efforts were futile, and that he had likely become a Quixote, trapped in fantasies of ascension into the celestial ether. If I failed to tell him this, I was engaged in something like a deception. But the deception was meant well. The lie was a compassionate one. What else, at this point, could I do for him?
The truth was, I had grown to like this strange man, with his absurd quest and anxious suitor. Sophie Friedman had the funds to buy a mystery and Lowenstein had the brilliance necessary to solve it. But the thing was insoluble, and so they would both go on, adrift, until the time came.
“Well,” Lowenstein sighed after I told him my half-truth, “my hopes weren’t high.” I wondered if he knew he had just insulted me. I decided it was probable that he did not, so I took no offense.
“I presume you’re exploring other, more promising approaches?” I said.
“Oh yes,” he replied. “Yes, yes.” His voice trailed off. There was a long silence and then he hung up.
I never spoke to him again. But I maintained my vague interest in him and his endeavor. At professional conferences and informal occasions, I would sometimes ask after him to no avail. Lowenstein, they said, had secreted himself. The rumor of the unknown project had solidified. They believed he had gone into the monastic seclusion necessary to achieve greatness once again.
The great work never came, which did not surprise me. I knew, perhaps alone, that Lowenstein had long since embarked on a path quite apart from his chosen field of expertise; a path that probably led nowhere. Nonetheless, I kept my ear to the ground. I listened for mentions of his name among colleagues or in the academic press, though these were few and far between.
Three years after my brief encounter with Lowenstein, Sophie Friedman died at age 90. She left most of her estate to charity. I hoped this meant her funds would be cut off and the Benedetti confiscated by heirs or executors. This would free Lowenstein of his burden or, at least, the financial means to bear it. But I also knew that facsimiles were easy to come by, and Lowenstein might very well continue his inquiries with his own funds.
At certain points, I contemplated intervention: I would confront Lowenstein with the futility of his quest before he demolished himself. But I knew this would be useless. Lowenstein had chosen this path and he was a man well-known for his refusal to deviate. This was how he made his great youthful breakthroughs, and there was no reason to think that he would be any different in his old age. I concluded that there was nothing to be done for him but to bear witness to whatever was to come.
A year and a half after Sophie Friedman’s death, it came: Word spread in my circles that Lowenstein had just published an article in a journal of Renaissance studies that claimed he had deciphered an incomprehensible book. I hoped it was true and he had proven me wrong, but it was with a sense of foreboding that I hunted up the journal online.
Most of the article was composed of obscure jargon and mathematical formulae that detailed various forms of statistical and textual analysis, as well as sundry methods of cryptography, but the conclusion was nonetheless clear: The Benedetti Manuscript was written in a medieval dialect of Latin, concealed beneath the square letters and an abstruse, complex cipher, further complicated by a smattering of Byzantine Greek.
His analysis, Lowenstein asserted, showed that the manuscript was a grimoire of sorts, a collection of obscure mystical speculations and spells dedicated to forms of theurgy and practical magic. Most of the content was derived from the Corpus Hermeticum and related literature, to the point of frequent direct quotations, which, by way of textual comparison, had given Lowenstein the means to decipher the text.
For some time, debate over Lowenstein’s announcement was muted and confined to virtual forums. There were, unbeknownst to me, large groups of Benedetti enthusiasts online who had long attempted in various ramshackle and amateur ways to solve the cipher and unstitch the incomprehensible. They gathered on various websites in order to discuss and debate—often with considerable invective—and each had their own preferred solution, to which they were attached with great violence.
In this virtual world, the reaction to Lowenstein’s article was hostile, as was to be expected. After all, he claimed to have bested them all at their avocation. Perhaps 90% of the participants denounced him as a charlatan in various vitriolic terms, but none made much effort to disprove or debunk his claim.
So, for some time, Lowenstein’s theory was left unmolested. The reaction on the part of the professionals was, for the most part, a species of quiet skepticism, a classic “wait and see” that left matters in the hands of the few experts on the subject and bided the time until they might render their judgment, such as it might be.
The judgment, when it came, was brutal and definitive. Professor John Mackenzie, an expert in early modern manuscripts at Oxford, published a paper in the foremost journal in the field that was quite as incomprehensible to me as Lowenstein’s original. Nonetheless, the conclusion was again clear: Computer and linguistic analyses had proven beyond question that Lowenstein’s theory was not only insupportable but egregiously wrong. The methods Lowenstein had employed, Mackenzie asserted, could only have revealed whatever Lowenstein wanted them to reveal. He had predetermined his conclusion and, thanks to the essential randomness of the text, imposed it on the object of his inquiries. It was a classic case of confirmation bias, of the scholar seeing what he wanted to see.
But Mackenzie went further, and I took no pleasure in it. He endorsed my own silent conclusion: In all likelihood, the apparent randomness of the text was precisely that. It appeared random because it was random. The Benedetti Manuscript was nothing more than an ingenious fraud. The strange congregation of letters meant nothing. Like four centuries of other luckless scholars, Lowenstein had been taken in by a hoax.
This vindication, such as it was, and known only to me, was a painful one. I wanted Lowenstein to have his final triumph, and now the legacy of his latter years would be that of a fool. The virtual world and its vultures would no doubt rejoice, not to mention Lowenstein’s many academic detractors who had suffered years of his eccentricities without complaint while waiting in patience for the proper moment to take revenge.
Lowenstein wrote no response to Mackenzie and made no attempt to defend his conclusions, which was taken as both surrender to and confirmation of Mackenzie’s attack. One or two Benedetti enthusiasts, however, for the most part online, did stay true to the old man. They insisted that there was at least the possibility that there was something in Lowenstein’s theory, but they were mocked and dismissed by all as “Manfred fanboys.” Almost to a man, the virtual minions celebrated Lowenstein’s humiliation and disgrace, which was understandable. It was the mystery they were in love with and Lowenstein had threatened to take it away from them. It was no surprise that they hated him.
The controversy receded, the virtual sleuths continued their efforts, and the attention of the academic and online worlds began to wane. Even the trolls and lurkers became fewer and farther between. The world, once again, as it had done for four centuries, forgot about the Benedetti Manuscript.
It forgot about Lowenstein as well. There was no further expectation of the great paradigm-shifting work to match his earlier accomplishments. As far as his peers were concerned, while they had waited with rapt anticipation, Lowenstein wasted his time and their faith on a frivolous and foolish endeavor. They felt betrayed, and for this, they would not forgive him. Lowenstein became, in short, a pariah.
Some two years after his disgrace, Manfred Lowenstein was found dead in his bedroom. The public encomiums were diplomatic. They focused on his youthful triumphs and dedicated only a line or two to the debacle that had annihilated his later career and reputation. In private, however, the strange details of Lowenstein’s end spread like wildfire in interested circles. I did not grant them much credibility at first, but on my own initiative, I examined the official records and discovered that they were, for the most part, accurate.
Lowenstein’s wife had died 10 years before, so it was his housekeeper who found him on the floor beside a small writing desk, felled by a sudden heart attack. The medical examiner later found significant obstructions of the arteries and wondered aloud at the fact that Lowenstein had lived as long as he did; though I knew it was his dedication to the cause that had kept him alive. The evidence of a natural death was overwhelming and evidence of foul play nonexistent. From this perspective, there was nothing unusual about Lowenstein’s demise.
What had shocked the housekeeper, the first responders, and then the police was something else. On the desk, they found the empty leather binding and covers of a large book, the advanced age of which was obvious. The pages had been ripped out with considerable violence one by one and were found pasted across every available vertical surface, including the windows, which distorted the sunlight and bathed the room in the eerie glow cast by the colors of the odd illuminated shapes. Alongside the pages were scrawled dozens of mathematical equations incomprehensible to the investigators and even the experts they consulted, along with obscure cryptograms and sequences of the square letters that meant nothing whatsoever. The atmosphere evoked by the scene was one of unmistakable and yet somehow methodical frenzy.
The investigators did the only thing they could, which was to photograph the scene and present the images to a forensic psychiatrist. He told them that proper diagnosis was impossible without a consultation with the patient—and Lowenstein was, after all, dead. Nonetheless, the psychiatrist speculated that some form of acute paranoia or even schizophrenia might be involved, though the onset of such illnesses at an advanced age was quite unusual. Still, the human mind is inscrutable and we can only guess at its inner workings. This, the psychiatrist lamented, was the best he could do.
As for the now mutilated Benedetti Manuscript itself, the authorities had no idea what to do. Matters were complicated by the fact that they discovered Lowenstein himself had been the rightful owner of the artifact, as Sophie Friedman had secretly bequeathed it to him upon her death. Worse still, Lowenstein had died intestate, which caused considerable confusion until a judge ruled that the legal heirs were Lowenstein’s two children, who now lived abroad. They had little interest in the manuscript beyond the fiduciary. They wrangled over price—which had dropped, needless to say, since the damage was done—for a brief time and then sold it to the institution that had been their father’s home for decades and still, despite everything, wanted to honor his memory.
The university, of course, wanted a colorful and even glamorous addition to its holdings, given the aura of the mysterious that surrounded the manuscript. In all other ways, it was now more or less useless. Still, they were scholars and other scholars were interested, so they made their best efforts to mitigate the damage to at least some degree. Over the course of several months, through the application of various potions, chemicals, and specialized tools, they managed to liberate the Benedetti Manuscript from the room in which its last owner had died.
This was not an unalloyed triumph, however. The victory was, at best, only partial. The paste Lowenstein had used was corrosive, and thus at least 50% of the manuscript could not be salvaged by even the most advanced technologies. The pages that had adorned the windows had been faded by the constant exposure to sunlight, and the illuminations’ vivid colors were gone forever. Some 10% of the manuscript had disappeared altogether and the pages were never found despite an extensive search of Lowenstein’s home and office. It is my belief that he burned them; perhaps because he found them the most inscrutable, perhaps for other reasons that will forever remain unknown. In any case, only the binding and the covers, which had not been abused, had been left more or less intact.
There were, of course, innumerable facsimiles of the original available to both scholars and amateurs, but as is the case with stolen artwork, lost films, and the like, it was the original that exercised the essential fascination and, thus, desire. Even if they could not have it, they still wanted to know it existed. They sought permission to hope that, someday, they might see and touch it. They took comfort in the knowledge that such a thing was in the world. Now, it no longer was. What remained was a demolished thing, a deformity, and this engendered not mere sorrow, but outrage. In academic circles, this took the form of a silent sense of tragedy. In the virtual world, however, condemnation was absolute and invective reigned. Lowenstein came to be referred to as “The Destroyer.” His name was erased, they refused to speak it, the damnatio memoriae came down, and Lowenstein survived only in a state of infamy.
Yet those minions in the dark still toil. Academic study of the Benedetti Manuscript has all but ceased, but the amateur efforts continue as they always have and, so far, remain futile. Among them is the small faction that always held true to Lowenstein. To their credit, they still defy the damnatio, though they refer to its object only as “L”. “L”, they insist, may or may not have gotten it wrong, but his method was sound, and they continue their efforts to apply it. To them, the supreme text is no longer the manuscript itself, but the great accretions; in particular, the fateful article in which Lowenstein outlined his theory and method. But more than any other object of reverence, they contemplate the police photographs of the scene of Lowenstein’s death. Fascinated by the walls of the rooms in which “L” met his end, they pore over the images of strange equations and shapes, Lowenstein’s last and largest marginalia. They hope for a revelation, a skeleton key. In the scrawls of a dying genius, some say, lies the secret of the world.
I wish them well in their endeavors, as I wished Lowenstein well in his own. My conviction that no secret will be found, because it does not exist, remains. But I am gladdened by the fact that Lowenstein’s ghost still commands disciples. And perhaps, after all, he was right and I am wrong.
Nonetheless, I now hope that I am not wrong; or if I am, that the disciples will never know it. I believe there is a secret of the world. Perhaps we are meant, someday, to know it. But man is a strange and dangerous creature. The moral weight of knowledge, even among the best of us, can never be known. If the secret were revealed, it is doubtful that we could survive it. I am certain that Lowenstein did not. Perhaps the secret is known, has long since been known, but the decipherers have chosen never to speak of it. If so, I hope they will remain silent.