The Solitudes
Page 1
BOOKS BY JOHN CROWLEY
THE ÆGYPT CYCLE
The Solitudes
Love & Sleep
Dœmonomania
Endless Things
NOVELS
The Deep
Beasts
Engine Summer
Little, Big
The Translator
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land
SHORT FICTION
Novelties and Souvenirs
The Childhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines
NONFICTION
In Other Words
Copyright
This edition first published in the United States in 2007 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
WOODSTOCK:
spanne Overlook Drive
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.overlookpress.com
[for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]
NEW YORK:
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 1987, 2007 by John Crowley
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from thepublisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-465-7
Contents
Books By John Crowley
Copyright
To the Reader
The Prologue in Heaven
The Prologue on Earth
I: Vita
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
II: Lucrum
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
III: Fratres
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Author Bio
TO THE READER
The Solitudes is the first volume of the Ægypt Cycle. This volume originally appeared in 1987 as Ægypt, with The Solitudes only as an an internal title. It can now appear as I first imagined it would, under its original title. The entire Cycle, all four volumes, is being published in a corrected uniform edition for the first time.
When this first volume appeared, it was introduced with the following Author’s Note:
More even than most books are, this is a book made out of other books. The author wishes to acknowledge his profound debt to those authors whose books he has chiefly plundered, and to offer his apologies for the uses to which he has put their work: to Joseph Campbell, to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, to Mircea Eliade, to Peter French, to Hans Jonas, to Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel, to Giorgio di Santillana, to Stephen Schoenbaum, to Wayne Shumaker, to Keith Thomas, to Lynn Thorndike, to D. P. Walker, and, most of all, to the late Dame Frances Yates, out of whose rich scholarship this fantasia on her themes has been largely quarried.
I have also put to use the speculations of John Michell and Katherine Maltwood, Robert Graves, Lois Rose, and Richard Deacon. I have used the translations and notes to the Hermetica of Walter Scott, and Gilbert P. Cunningham’s translation of the Soledades of Luis de Góngora.
But what follows is, still, a fiction, and the books that are mentioned, sought for, read, and quoted from within it must not be thought of as being any more real than the people and places, the cities, towns, and roads, the figures of history, the stars, stones, and roses that it also purports to contain.
I here reaffirm my debt to those authors, and my apologies to them, or to their shades. For the many names which subsequent volumes of the Ægypt Cycle added to the list, the Reader is invited to see those volumes when they appear.
THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN
There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor’s show. None was dressed in white; some wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; all their eyes were strangely gay. They kept pressing in by one and two, always room for more, they linked arms or clasped their hands behind them, they looked out smiling at the two mortals who looked in at them. All their names began with A.
—See! said one of the two men. Listen!
—I see nothing, said the other, the elder of them, who had often spent fruitless hours alone before this very showstone, fruitless though he prepared himself with long prayer and intense concentration: I see nothing. I hear nothing.
—Annael. And Annachor. And Anilos. And Agobel, said the younger man. God keep us and protect us from every harm.
The stone they looked into was a globe of moleskin-colored quartz the size of a fist, and the skryer who looked into it came so close to it that his nose nearly touched it, and his eyes crossed; he lifted his hands up to it, enclosing it as a man might enclose a fluttering candle-flame, to keep it steady.
They had been at work not a quarter of an hour before the stone when the first creature appeared: their soft prayers and invocations had ceased, and for a time the only sound was the rattle of the mullions in a hard March wind that filled up the night. When the younger of them, Mr. Talbot, who knelt before the stone, began to tremble as though with cold, the other hugged his shoulder to still him; and when the shivering had not ceased, he had risen to stir the fire; and it was just then that the skryer said: Look. Here is one. Here is another.
Doctor Dee—the older man, whose stone it was—turned back from the fire. He felt a quick shiver, the hair rose on his neck, and a warmth started in his breastbone. He stood still, looking to where the candle flame glittered doubly, on the surface of the glass and in its depths. He felt the breaths in the room of the wind that blew outside, and heard its soft hoot in the chimney. But he saw nothing, no one, in his gray glass.
—Do you tell me, he said softly, and I will write what you say.
He put down the poker, and snatched up an old pen and dipped it. At the top of a paper he scribbled the date: March 8th, 1582. And waited, his wide round eyes gazing through round black-bound spectacles, for what he would be told. His own heartbeat was loud in his ears. Never before had a spirit come to a glass of his so quickly. He could not, himself, ever see the beings who were summoned, but he was accustomed to sitting or kneeling in prayer beside his mediums or skryers for an hour, two hours before some ambiguous glimpse was caught. Or none at all.
Not on this night: not on this night. Through the house, as though the March wind outside had now got in and was roaming the rooms, there was heard a patter of raps, thumps, and knockings; in the library the pages of books left open turned one by one. In her bedchamber Dr. Dee’s wife awoke, and pulled aside the bed curtains to see the candle she had left burning for her husband gutter and go out.
Then the noises and the wind ceased, and there was a pause over the house and the town (over London and all England too, a still windless silence as of a held breath, a pause so sudden and complete that the Queen at Richmond awoke, and looked out her window to see the moon’s face looking in at he
r). The young man held his hands up to the stone, and in a soft and indistinct voice, only a little louder than the skritching of the doctor’s pen, he began to speak.
—Here is Annael, he said. Annael who says he is answerable to this stone. God his mercy on us.
—Annael, said Doctor Dee, and wrote. Yes.
—Annael who is the father of Michael and of Uriel. Annael who is the Explainer of God’s works. He must answer what questions are put to him.
—Yes. The Explainer.
—Look now. Look how he opens his clothes and points to his bosom. God help us and keep us from every harm. In his bosom a glass; in the glass a window, a window that is like this window.
—I make speed to write.
—In the window, a little armed child, as it were a soldier infant, and she bearing a glass again, no a showstone like this one but not this one. And in that stone …
—In that stone, Doctor Dee said. He looked up from the shuddery scribble with which he had covered half a sheet. In that stone …
—God our father in heaven hallowed be thy name. Christ Jesus only begotten son our Lord have mercy on us. There is a greater thing now coming.
The skryer no longer saw or heard but was: in the center of the little stone that the little smiling child held out was a space so immense that the legions of Michael could not fill it. Into that space with awful speed his seeing soul was drawn, his throat tightened and his ears sang, he shot helplessly that way as though slipping over a precipice. There was not anything then but nothing.
And out of that immense emptiness, ringing infinite void at once larger than the universe and at its heart—out of that nothing a something was being extruded, with exquisite agony produced, like a drop. It was not possible for anything to be smaller or farther away than this drop of nothing, this seed of light; when it had traveled outward for æon upon æon it had grown only a little larger. At last, though, the inklings of a universe began to be assembled around it, the wake of its own strenuous passage, and the drop grew heavy; the drop became a shout, the shout a letter, the letter a child.
Through the meshing firmaments this one came, and through successive dark heavens pulled aside like drapes. The startled stars looked back at his shouted password, and drew apart to let him through; young, potent, his loose hair streaming backward and his eyes of fire, he strode to the border of the eighth sphere, and stood there as on a crowded quay.
Set out, set out. So far had he come already that the void from which he had started, the void larger than being, was growing small within him, was a seed only, a drop. He had forgotten each password as soon as he spoke it; had come to be clothed in his passage as in clothing, heavy and warm. After æons more, after inconceivable adventures, grown forgetful, unwise, old, by boat and train and plane he would come at last to Where? Whom was he to speak to? For whom was the letter, whom was the shout to awaken?
When he took ship he still knew. He took ship: those crowding the quay parted for him, murmuring: he put his foot upon a deck, he took the lines in his hands. He sailed under the sign of Cancer, painted on his bellied mainsail; at length there came to be two lights burning on his yardarms, were they Castor and Pollux? Spes proxima: far off, far far off, a blue planet turned, an agate, a milky gem.
THE PROLOGUE ON EARTH
A prayer said at bedtime to her guardian angel was enough, always, to wake his cousin Hildy at whatever hour she needed to get up: so she said. She said she would ask to be awakened at six or seven or seven-thirty, and go to sleep with a picture in her mind of the clock’s face with its hands in that position, and when next she opened her eyes, that’s what she would see.
He could not do this himself, and wasn’t sure he believed Hildy could either, though he had no way to dispute it. Maybe—like Peter walking on water—he could use the Hildy method if he could only have enough faith, but he just didn’t, and if he woke late he would miss Mass, with incalculable results; the priest would perhaps have to turn to the people, with his sad frog face, and ask if anyone there was capable of serving; and some man in work clothes would come up, and pull at the knees of his trousers, and kneel on the lower step there where he should be but was not.
So he woke by a brass alarm clock that stood on four feet and had a bell atop it that two clappers struck alternately, as though it were beating its brains out. It was so loud that the first moments of its ringing didn’t even seem like sound, but like something else, a calamity, he was awake and sitting up before he understood what it was: the clock, hollering and walking on its feet across the bureau top. His cousin Bird in the other bed only stirred beneath her covers, and was still again as soon as he stilled the clock.
He was awake, but unable to get up. He turned on the lamp beside his bed; it had a shade that showed a dim landscape, and an outer shade, transparent, on which a train was pictured. There was a book beneath the lamp, overturned open the night before, and he picked it up. He almost always filled the time between having to wake up and having to get up with the book he had put down the night before. He was ten years old.
Often in later life Giordano Bruno would recall his Nolan childhood with affection. It appears frequently in his works: the Neapolitan sun on its golden fields and the vineyards that clad Mt. Cicala; the cuckoos, the melons, the taste of mangia-guerra, the thick black wine of the region. Nola was an ancient town, between Vesuvius and Mt. Cicala; in the sixteenth century its Roman ruins were still visible, the temple, the theater, small shrines of mysterious provenance. Ambrosius Leo had come to Nola early in the century, to plot the town, its circular walls, its twelve towers, and discover the geometries on which—like all ancient towns—Leo believed it must be based.
Bruno grew up in the suburb of Cicala, four or five houses clustered outside the old Nolan walls. His father, Gioan, was an old soldier, poor but proud, who had a pension and kept a garden plot. He used to take his son on expeditions up the mountainsides. Bruno recalled how, from the green slopes of Mt. Cicala, old Vesuvius looked bare and grim; but when they climbed Vesuvius, it turned out to be just as green, just as tilled, the grapes just as sweet; and when, at evening, he and his father looked back toward Mt. Cicala, from where they had come, Cicala was the one that seemed stony and deserted.
Bruno said at his trial that it was then he discovered that sight could deceive. Actually, he had discovered something far more central to his later thought: he had discovered Relativity.
Now the train on his lampshade, heated by the bulb, had begun with great slowness to advance through the dim landscape. The clock pointed at late numbers. Mass was at six-forty-five on weekday mornings, and he was serving every day for a week; after he served the earliest Sunday Mass, someone else would take over the daily duty, and he would do just Sundays, climbing the ladder of Mass hours up to the sung Mass at eleven. Then he’d begin again with a week of dark mornings.
This system was peculiar to the tiny clapboard church in the holler, invented by its priest to make the most of the only five or six altar boys he had; to the boys, though, it had the force of natural law: like the progress of the Mass itself, ineffectual, the priest said, unless every word was spoken.
He was a boy who saw spirits in the beech and laurel woods; but he also could sit patiently at the feet of Father Teofilo of Nola, who taught him Latin and the laws of logic, and told him that the world was round. In his Dialogues Bruno sometimes gives the spokesman for his own philosophy that priest’s name: Teofilo. He writes in the De monade, his last long Latin poem: Far back in my boyhood the struggle began.
By the time he had pulled on his sneakers and jeans and the two flannel shirts he wore one over the other, and gone the dim long journey through the house to the kitchen, his mother had appeared there, and had poured him milk. They spoke only the few words required, both too sleepy still to do more than ask and answer. He was aware that his mother resented the priest’s insistence that a boy of ten was old enough to get up and walk to Mass at such an hour. Boys of ten, the priest had sa
id, are up and working in these parts at that hour, working hard, too. His mother thought, though she didn’t say it, that the priest had condemned himself out of his own mouth. Working!
In the light of the kitchen lamp, the day was night, but when he went out the door, the sky had a soft bloom, and the road down the hill was patent between dark hedges. The day was the eighth of March in 1953. From the broad porch he could see over the valley to the next hilltop, gray, leafless, and lifeless-seeming; yet he knew that people were living over there, had daffodils in their yards, were now plowing and planting, had fires lit. The church couldn’t be seen, but it was there, under the wing of that hill. From the church, the porch he stood on couldn’t be seen.
Relativity.
He wondered if, as well as Latin, the priest knew the laws of logic. The laws of logic! They tasted strangely rich to his thought, within the chewy consonants of the phrase. The priest had taught him only the Latin of the Mass, to be memorized phonetically. Introibo ad altare Dei.
He knew the earth was round, though; nobody had to tell him that.
Down in the valley beyond the town, a coal train that had lain unmoving all night, a caravan of dark beasts all alike, started with a long shudder. It might be a hundred cars long: he had often counted trains longer than that. The cars were being filled at the breaker near the pithead of the mine, and the train would take hours to be loaded and pass out of the town and the valley to wherever it went. The locomotive pulling it puffed slow and hard as an old man taking steps uphill: One. One. One. One.
His road led downward to the main road, by the crick, which went to town and past the church and beyond. Thinking of early-morning dogs, he set out, thrusting his hands into the grimy familiar pockets of his jacket, familiar but not somehow his own. I’m not from here, he thought: and because that was true, it seemed to account for the shrinking he felt of the tender aliveness within him from the touch of this: this raw twilight, this road, that black train and its smoke. I’m not from here; I’m from someplace different from this. The road seemed longer than it ever did by day; at the bottom of the hill, the world was still dark, and dawn was far away.