Customarily presented as one Writing, this self-portrait always seemed to have two beginnings: after composing a prelude of half a dozen paragraphs, the Author starts the story over again, as if he had failed to reread — or to remember accurately — what he had already written.

This is not the only possible explanation for such a discrepancy, of course, and it is at puzzling interstices such as this that the curious (or skeptical) reader often turns into an investigator, compelled to search for clues that might account for the phenomenon.

So far definitive evidence remains elusive. However, the issue was apparently thought significant enough for a recent Curator to break the Writing into two parts, appending "redux" (unknown origin; here it seems to mean "begin again") to the Title of the second part, which is appropriate, given the revenance of ancient locutions in this latter segment, upon which the Scholar cannot help but remark.

This sundering of the Scholar's "apology" (itself an archaic usage) into two Writings has been respected here; nevertheless, the reader should be reminded that the majority opinion continues to be that this is still a single Writing, with only one Author: the Scholar who transmitted the archives from Egderus to us.