Aegypt (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John Crowley

A swim. A long dive into dark water. Always that moment, as you leaped, when the desired water made you afraid, a moment in the middle of the air when you half-changed your mind, decided not to dive after all, a thrill of oh-no that was swept off by the cloven water’s cold solidity and the bliss of being in it.

He was too young to be a beatnik; later, he would find himself too old, and too strictly reared, to be a success as a hippie. He came to consciousness in a moment of uneasy stasis, between existential and communal, psychoanalytic and psychedelic; and like many who feel themselves naked within, unfilled by notions, and without a plot, he clothed himself in a kind of puritanical dandyism, consisting mostly of an unwillingness to be pleased and black clothes of unidentifiable cut. He stood aloof in these clothes from a world he could not quite think how to criticize, and waited to see what would happen next.

Inside this frame there was someone small, even delicate, and deeply embarrassed by the ears on Pierce’s head, the rug on his chest; and though (like Lincoln’s) Pierce’s disabilities would begin to shape up into interesting qualities by his thirties and seem to promise an old age of rugged character, even craggy good looks, Pierce would never forget how repellent the small person within had always found him.

We cannot help imposing our desires on the world – even though the world remains impervious to them, and keeps to laws that are not the laws our natures suppose it ought to have.

So let us learn, by all means, why the voices wailed that Pan was dead. Let us learn – the answers are simple enough – why Moses had horns, and why the Israelites worshipped a golden calf; why Jesus was a fish, and why a man with a water-jug on his shoulder directed the Apostles – the Twelve – to an upper room. But let us not think that in such explorations we have disposed of or robbed of significance the story these figures tell. The story remains; if it changes, and it does, it is because our human nature is not fixed; there is more than one history of the world. But when we believe that we have proved there is no story, that history is nothing but one damned thing after another, that can only be because we have ceased to recognize ourselves.

outward through whole universes of thought, each growing somehow smaller the more he learned about it, until it was too small to live within, and he passed on outward, closing the door behind him.

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of.

‘It’s not true. This is not a true story and does not take place in the universe we live in. Whatever it is about this book that is important, and I think it is important,’ eyes lowered here reverently for a moment, ‘it’s not that it is informative about the world we live on or in. What we are going to have to discover is how it can be important to us anyway. In other words, why it is a Classic.’

Let’s just not be too hasty: that’s all Barr was telling his students, his gray-suited and crew-cut students back at the end of the Age of Reason. Let’s recognize – though it surprises and confuses us, it’s so – that the facts are not finally extricable from the stories. Outside our stories, outside ourselves, is the historyless, inhuman, utterly other physical world; and within our human lives within that world are our stories, our ramparts, without which we would go mad, as a man prevented from dreaming in the end goes mad. Not true, no: only necessary.

He felt like someone who had set out for the Memphis of crocodiles and moonlit temples and wound up in Tennessee.

He thought there were five basic needs a human being had: for food, and shelter; clothing, if that wasn’t shelter; for sex, or love, if that was different; and for Meaning. Deprived of meaning a man might wither and die as surely as if deprived of food or water.

How far off ? What could mark the limit? What reason could there be for them to end? Infinite, Lucretius said, who could think of no reason. Cusanus said: a circle, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere. No. Cusanus had only spoken so of God. It was he, Giordano Bruno, who was saying it of God’s creation, the shadow of God that was the universe. If there was an end to the stars then God was not God. It was not only clear to him, neck bent staring upward, as clear as this air, it was self-evident; he seemed to have always known it, and had simply never said it aloud. Infinite. He felt its infinity tugging at his heart and eyes, and he felt an answering infinity within himself: for if it was infinite outside, then it must be infinite inside as well.

Why must I live in two worlds, Pierce asked, why. Do we all, or is it only some few, living always in two worlds, a world outside of us that is real but strange, a world within that makes sense, and draws tears of assent from us when we enter there.