Our

 Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

Creating the Creator of

a Book about Economics

I can’t remember when or how I first came up with the name of Benjamin T. Profante.

Everybody calls him Benny.

I created him.

Benny’s the name of the main character in the Great American Novel that I’ve been writing for fifty years and probably won't ever finish.

When I first began writing the book, in the 70s, I caste Benny as a young writer from a small town, dreamy and obscure, a college graduate living by choice in a $25-a-week room in a rundown brick building in a big city because that’s how famous writers lived before they were discovered and got on the Johnny Carson Show and became famous and wouldn’t the girls back in the old home town be kicking themselves for not choosing him.

That’s how I wrote about Benny when I first got started.

In the more recent chapters, however, many written during Covid, Benny is getting to be an old guy who likes beer, knows his neighbors and keeps his yard up. Only two or three other people on his suburban block know that he’s a writer and they don’t spread it around. As long as somebody keeps their yard up and doesn’t make loud noises, they can do whatever they like on their own time in the Constitutional sanctity of their own home.

I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not Benny; that Benny is a fictional character, ontologically not me. He’s an image of an image in a mind -- mine -- that creates images of itself, which is confusing, I know, but that’s where writers live, in temporary homes, seeking a common language to communicate things to others so that the world changes its ways, everybody getting along and being productive.

I’m starting to realize that my Great American Novel is a book about a book with an evolving plot being written by a character I created out of thin air, like facing mirrors in a hallway reflecting one another theoretically forever. I've always hoped to catch just one of them, one reflection. Hold one in place. Examine it. Zen-like.

My Great American Novel is probably tens of thousands of pages long by now. Much of it is in boxes in storage or in old computer files. Much of it has been lost along the way… frequent, often hectic moves; crashed hard drives. But enough remains to get a general idea.

Especially in winter when I’ve got a fire going in the fireplace as storms sweep down off the mountains, I like to revisit some of the “old stuff,” as I like to put it. Everybody has their boxes of “old stuff.” Because I’m a writer, my “old stuff” is a book about a made-up character named Benny who’s writing his own Great American Novel that he calls "Benny’s book.”

It’s fascinating to watch how the plot and perspective of Benny’s book has changed over the years. In the beginning, people over 30 were dangerous, leading us into war. But then, in the 80s, he became one of them, a home with an apple tree in the backyard, married with children.

Around the turn of the century, however, Benny’s book started to take off in an unexpected direction after he decided to write a book about economics.

He even came up with a new working title for it.

Over the years, Benny had played around with lots of working titles. In the 70s, he thought of calling it “Genesis;” in the 80s it became “Revelations” … and so on.

Now that he was getting old and working on final drafts, he decided to call the book, “Oikos Gnosis.”

How he came up with that cryptic title became the latest plot of his book. It starts when he was young and bumming around, thumbing his way around the country and gets picked up somewhere in Montana by another undiscovered writer who tells him that writers should always carry an Oxford-level dictionary around with them, difficult when the world has to fit into a backpack, but incentive to get a room. It had to be Oxford-level, he said, because then it would have a word’s most detailed etymological background. A dictionary can help explain what a word means today, but you need etymology to relive a word’s history. Without a past, a word is just another brick in a brick wall.

It was not long after 9/11 when Benny decided to write a book about economics. Looking for answers, he recalled James Carville’s famous one-liner: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

He knew that nobody would read a book about economics. So it would have to be a novel, a love story with international intrigue, the economics in code.

How to begin?

Then he remembered that he knew how to do it -- etymology.

He asked himself: “What does the word, ‘economics,’ mean?”

He dove into the Oxford-level dictionary he had always carried around with him wherever he went over the years. He dove past what the word is generally taken to mean today. He dove back to where the word was born -- Greece -- before even the dawn of the Roman empire.

The word had a prefix and a suffix.

He started with the prefix, "eco."

It came from the ancient Greek word, “Oikos,” which meant household, or home.

Benny’s jaw dropped.

He already knew that the ancient Greek word, “Gnosis,” was where we got words like knowing and knowledge and knew.

Even a stupid person could understand that economics was as simple as putting the two words together -- “Oikos Gnosis.”

Oikos Gnosis, mmm, Benny thought to himself, rubbing his chin… knowledge of our home, or realizing that we are already there, taking care of our yard.

I still have to remind myself that Benny is writing Oikos Gnosis, not me. It’s his creation, so anything is possible.