The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  “What,” he asked Earl Sacrobosco, “is the Age of Aquarius?”

  Pierce and another young teacher, a woman named Julie who had just come to the school to teach New Age journalism, were at a small dinner party at the Sacroboscos. Earl had acquired a little pot, ho ho, for him and the youngsters to try out after Mrs. Sacrobosco had gone to bed.

  “The Age of Aquarius?” Earl said, his eyebrows wrinkling up and down rapidly (his toupee remained motionless though, always a giveaway). “Well, it’s an effect of the precession of the equinoxes. Very simple really. See, the earth turning on its axis”—he pointed his forefingers at each other and revolved them—”doesn’t have a regular motion, it has a little bobble in it, it moves sort of like a top when it’s running down.” The fingers described this eccentricity. “One whole movement, though, takes a long time, about twenty-six thousand years, to complete. Now one effect of this is that the direction the axis points in the sky—true north—changes slowly over time; the star pointed to, the North Star, is a different star at the beginning of the cycle and halfway through.”

  “Hm,” said Pierce, visualizing.

  “Another effect,” Earl went on, “is that the star background shifts vis-à-vis the sun. Just as the relative positions of things in this room change if you waggle your head slowly around.” They all did that, and fell to giggling for a while. “So, so,” Earl said, “the star background shifts. You can measure this by noting, at a specific day every year, what sign of the zodiac the sun is rising with; and the days you choose are the equinoxes, the days that are the same length as the nights, if you see what I mean. And if you do that over a very long time, centuries, you can see that the sun is very gradually falling back. It’s rising, on the equinox, slightly later every century, that is, in a slightly more easterly part of the sign. And you can suppose, well, it will keep on doing that till it has fallen all the way back around. And so it does.” He lapsed into thought, brow rising, rug remaining fixed. “So it does.”

  “Yes?” Pierce said. “And so?”

  “So every once in a while, a long while, the sun rises one morning in a new sign. It has slipped right out of one and back into the previous one. Right now it rises on the spring equinox in some early degree of the sign Pisces. But it’s always on the move—relative to us, that is, it’s really us who are on the move; and pretty soon—well, astronomically speaking pretty soon, a couple hundred years or so—the sun will begin to rise in the sign of Aquarius. Thus the end of the Piscean Age, which started two-thousand-odd years ago, and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.”

  Two thousand years ago, the Piscean age, the world shifts from BC to AD. Jesus. And Jesus was a fish.

  Oh. “Oh,” said Pierce.

  “Always precedes, you see,” Earl said dreamily. “Precedes. Before Pisces was Aries the ram, and before that Taurus the bull, and so on.”

  Moses had ram’s horns, who overthrew the golden bull-calf. And then comes Jesus the fish, two thousand years on, new heaven and new earth, and shepherd Pan flees from the mountainsides. And now the world watched and waited for the man with the water jug.

  “The kids,” Pierce said, “claim it’s starting now.”

  “Yes, well,” Earl said indulgently.

  Pierce felt again, intensely, that sensation of a series of magic-lantern slides projected within him, all at once, all overlapping, all in some sense the same slide. Had he heard about this before too, and only forgotten it? Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna: yes, sure, the Virgin returns, because if, when Virgil was writing that line two thousand years ago, the sun was entering Pisces, then on the autumnal equinox it would rise in one two three four five six yes in Virgo. So Virgil it seems knew about this stuff too. And he, Pierce, had read him and studied him at St. Guinefort’s, and hadn’t understood. He felt as though if this kept up he would find himself sitting once again before his earliest ABC books, his first catechism, saying Oh I get it, this was the story encoded in these stories, this is the secret that was kept from me.

  Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead: the great god Pan is dead.

  “I thought,” Julie said, “that the equinox is March 21st.”

  “So it is, about,” said Earl.

  “But that’s Aries.”

  “So it was, once. Maybe when the whole system was codified, it was.”

  “But then all these sun signs and birth signs are wrong.” She sounded affronted. Pierce knew she set great store by her own sign and what it implied for her. Around her neck hung an enameled copper scorpion. “They’re way off.”

  “It’s adjusted for, in the system,” Earl said vaguely. He moved his hand as though tuning a TV. “Adjustments are made.”

  Pierce shook his head, buffaloed. Some kind of collision seemed to be taking place within him, a collision of just unprecedented magnitude, two vast sedans, both of them his, coming together in slow, slow motion, their noses crumpling, their drivers aghast. “But it’s just this little bobble,” he said.

  “Imagine the effect, though,” Earl said, raising the smoldering joint to his lip, “if the earth were stationary. The whole heavens would be shifting. Very important-seeming stuff.”

  “But they aren’t,” Pierce said.

  Earl grinned. “Well, all that stuff is coming back,” he squeaked with held breath. “It’s a new age.”

  Redeunt Saturnia regna: the old gold age that once was is come again. Walking home through the illuminated streets, in bed with Julie, at breakfast, on the toilet, standing abstracted before his students, Pierce came to feel often, like a clutch in his throat or a hum in his ears, that sense of collision he had first felt at Earl’s: as though he had come upon some kind of crossroads, no, as though he were himself a crossroads, a place where caravans met, freighted with heavy goods, come from far places, colliding there with others come from different far places, headed elsewhere: pack-trains, merchants carrying jewels sewn in their clothing, dark nomads from nowhere carrying nothing, imperial couriers, spies, lost children. The history he thought he knew, the path called History that he walked every working day, the path that led backward through a maze of battles, migrations, conquests, bankruptcies, revolutions, one damn thing after another, men and women doing and saying, dreaming and playing, till it coiled finally and unknowably upon itself at the side of a cold campfire on some vast and silent veldt—from that path, it seemed, there forked another, just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, to him as to others, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. It seemed to spring out from the very foot of the napless velveteen armchair (recently rescued from the street) in which late at night Pierce sat thinking.

  Down that road, the past did not grow darker with distance, but brighter; that way lay the morning lands, wise forefathers who knew what we have forgotten, radiant cities built by arts now lost.

  Nor did that road go curling off to an ending lost amid the beasts: no, though far shorter than the road Pierce called History, it was in fact infinite, because just as its furthest age rolled back to its first days, the whole road completed a circle; the serpent took in its mouth the fast-dwindling tip of its tail. Nowadays history is made of time; but once it was made of something else.

  Now that would be a story to tell his kids, wouldn’t it, he thought. The story of that history not made of time; that history which is as different from History yet as symmetrical to it as dream is to waking.

  As dream is to waking.

  He pulled himself from his new armchair with some difficulty and went to the window; he turned out his lights and stood looking out into the never dark city.

  There had been a morning once, when he was a child—how old had he been, not more than five or six—when he had awakened from frightening dreams, labyrinthine pursuit and loss, and his mother had tried to explain to him the nature of dreams, and why it is that, though you seem in them to be in mortal danger, you can’t be hurt, not really. Dreams, s
he said, are only stories: except they aren’t stories outside, like the ones in books, the stories Daddy tells. Dreams are your own stories, inside.

  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.

  Funny, he thought; funny funny funny. In fact he had begun to feel funny, as though the rotation of the earth could be felt through his naked feet. Maybe he hadn’t really lost his vocation, after all; maybe he had just misplaced it, had long ago closed the door by mistake on the one story that could not be outgrown: this story about how there is a story. That old closed door had blown open in the winds that were rising, and there were other doors beyond it, door after door, opening backward endlessly into the colored centuries.

  When he had first begun teaching at Barnabas, because of his rather ambiguous degree in Renaissance Studies Pierce had been set to teaching not only history but freshman lit, or Introduction to World Literature, a course that still had compulsory status then. Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes all fled past in the first semester, well over most of the students’ heads, slow-flapping pterosaurs dimly glimpsed; Pierce supposed that if in later life they met any of those authors, it would be nice to be able to claim they had once before been introduced.

  When he got to Dante, whom he had always found a trial, Pierce used to employ a trick he had learned from Dr. Kappel at Noate, who had taught him the equivalent freshman course and had also found Dante unsympathetic. At the beginning of class, as Dr. Kappel had, he would draw a circle on the blackboard.

  “The world,” he would say.

  A hatch mark on the world’s edge. “Jerusalem. Beneath Jerusalem is Hell, going down sort of spirally or in a cone shape like this.” A spiral to the center of the world circle. “In here are the souls of the damned, as well as many of the fallen angels. In the very center, in a frozen pit, a gigantic figure: the Devil, Satan, Lucifer.” A little stick man. “Now.” He drew a blip on the far side of the world, opposite Jerusalem. “Over here is a seven-level mountain, Purgatory, standing all alone in the empty southern sea. Here on various levels are more of the dead, lesser sinners whose crimes have been forgiven but not paid for.”

  With a sweep of chalk, he next drew a circle around the earth circle, and a crescent on it. “Above the earth, circling it, the moon. Above the moon, the sun.” More circles, extending outward: “Mercury. Venus. Mars.” When he had got seven circles indicated around the circle of the earth, one more: “The stars, all fixed, turning around the earth once in twenty-four hours.” He tapped the board with his chalk: “Outside it all, God. With myriads of angels, who keep it all rolling in order around the earth.”

  Then he would step back, contemplating this picture, and he would ask, “Now what’s the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe here, which is the picture Dante presents us with in his poem?”

  Silence, usually.

  “Oh, come on,” Pierce would say. “The very first most evident thing about this picture.”

  A timid guess, usually from a girl: “It’s very religiously inspired. …”

  “No no no,” Pierce would say, grinning, “no, the very first thing we notice.” And grabbing up his copy of Dante, still grinning, flourishing it at them: “It’s not true! It’s not true. There isn’t any hell in the middle of the earth with the Devil stuck in it. False. Not so. There is not a seven-story mountain in the empty southern sea, or an empty southern sea either.” He regarded his picture again, pointing out its features. His students had begun to dare to chuckle. “The earth, ladies and gentlemen, is not in the center of the universe, or even of the solar system. Sun, planets, stars going around it: not the case. About God outside it all I give no opinion, but he’s difficult to believe in in exactly this form. I would think.

  “So.” Turning to them again, fun over: “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.”

  And then it was on, easily or at least more easily, into the dark wood, the sages and the lovers, the burning popes, the shit and spew, the dark journey downward and the light journey upward. It was a good trick, and Pierce had perfected it over two or three semesters when, one late autumn day, he turned from the completed picture to ask: “Now what is the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe?” And found himself regarded by a pirate band (with its captives) that made up his Intro to World Lit class, their eyes dully alive, mouths slightly open, at peace and fascinated.

  “What,” he said, without his wonted vigor, “is the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe?”

  They seemed to stir, noticing many things but uncertain which was first; they seemed, some of them, beguiled by his mandala, as though he had drawn it to entrance them. Others seemed asleep, or elsewhere, their abandoned bodies breathing softly. Those who took a hectic interest giggled at a joke or a game different from the one Pierce was playing. And Pierce felt grow within him the horripilating conviction that the distinction he was about to make would not be understood; that he did not, after all, wholly understand it himself any longer.

  “It’s not true,” he said, gently, as to sleepwalkers he was afraid to wake. “It’s really really not true.”

  Making his way out of the building that day, past the squatting groups of beggars and the pamphleteers’ tables, Pierce found himself wondering how Frank Walker Barr was getting on with his classes these days. Old Barr, kind Barr, gently, tentatively suggesting that there might remain in this cold and clinker-built world some pockets yet of mystery, some outlying villages that had not yet been pacified, perhaps never to be reduced; Barr telling stories, insisting on the worth of stories, always with that saving chuckle—well it was coals to Newcastle now, it was worse than that, time had turned around and brought in a new sign, these kids believed the stories they were told.

  “Well it makes a lot of sense,” Julie said to him. “Astronomically there might be a long time to wait; but if we were in the cusp we could feel it, and be influenced by it, and see the signs; and we do—I do.” Sitting cross-legged on his bed—their bed—she was coating, with dreamy care, her nails in bright lacquers, attempting a suite of symbols, star, moon, eye, sun, crown. “The cusp might be this blank time, anything can happen, the old age of one world and beginning of another; you’re poised right at the change, and all things that were are now going to be different, everything conceivable is just for a second possible, and you see, like coming toward you out of the future, the next people, and you’re watching them come forward, beautiful, and you’re waiting to hear what they’ll say, and wondering if you’ll understand them when they speak.” She held up her mystic hand to Pierce. “It makes a lot of sense,” she said.

  They’re just going to dream their new world-age into being, Pierce marveled; but how otherwise did new world-ages come to be? You have to be on their side, he thought, you have to be: a pity and a love welled up in him for the children, the ragged ranks on pilgrimage along the only way there was to go, after all, making up the future as they went. And in the thought-cloud over every head a single question mark.

  What they needed—what he was coming to need himself, for that matter—was not more stories so much as an account: an account, an explanation of why these world-tales, exactly these and not others, should be now abroad again, after long sleep, and why, though they could not on the face of it be true, they could just now seem to be true, or to be coming true. An account; a model; some means by which those who fed on notions as on bread might be able to tell which ones were really news and which were the old
dreams still being dreamed, were stories inside which the human race had never completely awakened from, or did not know it had awakened from: for those who do not know they have awakened from a dream are condemned to go on dreaming it unaware.

  Because the Age of Aquarius, no, it was fatuous, wasn’t it? Surely it was not the age but the heart, it wasn’t even all hearts, that turned from gold to lead and back to gold again; Moses had horns because of some error in translation from Hebrew to Latin or Latin to English, Jesus was as much Lamb or Lion as he was Fish, and the world turned on a bent tree for reasons of its own, which had nothing to do with us. To start assenting to one of these huge stories or another—well, what did you do with all the other stories, for one thing, just as big and just as compelling, that appeared in the fabric of history if the fabric (a shot silk, a changeable taffeta) were looked at in a different light? No, surely Barr had only wanted to suggest that economic and social forces could not by themselves generate the bizarre facts of human history, and that to be unable to experience the titanic shuffling on and off stage of windswept allegories was to miss not only half the fun of history but to exclude yourself from how history, man’s long life on earth, has been actually experienced by those who were creating it, which is just as much the historian’s subject, after all, as the in-fact material conditions and discoverable actions are.