by John Crowley
For this book was not different after all from his own book, unfinished also (unstarted for that matter); for that matter his own life seemed the same, the unwritten, unwritable book of his own whole lived life, only another edition, with the same title too. A confusing title, Julie had said, and hard to file.
He regarded the staggered heap, all facedown, over but not done with. What public, he wondered, had Kraft thought he was writing for, who had he supposed would want to read such a thing? No one, perhaps, which is why it lay still on his desk, unfinished, unpublished, lying in wait for its single ideal reader.
For it wasn’t a good book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world—as it really had gone on if you meant this world, this only one in which, metaphors aside, we all have really and solely lived in. The characters were hungry ghosts, without the cheerful lifelike rotundity Pierce remembered from Kraft’s other things, from like Bitten Apples or that one about Wallenstein. The dozens of historical figures, none except for the most minor as far as Pierce could tell made up, the actual incidents great and small in which they in fact participated, all reduced to a winter’s tale by the springs their actions were imagined here to have: the birth-pangs and death-throes of world-ages, the agonies of potent magicians, the work of dæmons, of Christ’s tears, of the ordering stars.
No no no, he had said to Julie, no, these Rosicrucians preserving their secret histories, passing them down through the ages encoded in secret books that mean the opposite of what they say, working to alter the lives of empires, lurking behind the thrones of kings and popes—come on: secret societies, Freemasons, illuminati haven’t had real power in history. Can’t you see, he’d said, the truth is so much more interesting: secret societies have not had power in history, but the notion that secret societies have had power in history has had power in history.
And yet. And yet.
Finish writing it, huh. Unlike histories, stories need endings; the pages of notes at the bottom of Kraft’s manuscript only carried the story far forward, massing more years and books and characters, enough (it seemed to Pierce glancing through them) to fill another two, another three volumes without coming to an end.
But Pierce could imagine an ending; he could. Could imagine how, after the great change had all gone by—a Noah’s flood, a storm of difference sweeping all the old world away, a storm composed of the Thirty Years’ War, of tercios, Wallenstein, fire and sword; of Reason, Descartes, Peter Ramus, Bacon, and of Unreason too, the witches on their gibbets aflame—after it had all been swept into the unrecoverable again, Rosicrucian brothers fleeing, the Stone, the Cup, the Cross, the Rose all blown away like leaves—he could imagine that under a fuliginous and pitchy sky (dawn due to come, but otherwhere and elsewhen than there and then) they would be gathered up, the heroes of that age which would be by that time already growing imaginary, gathered up one by one by an old man, his beard white as milk and a star on his forehead. Gathered up. Come along now, for our time is past. One by one, from workshops and caves in Prague and philosophical gardens in Heidelberg, from cells and palaces of Rome and Paris and London. All over now. And where then shall they go? The wind is rising with the dawn; they step onto the deck of that ship restless at anchor, whose sails are already filling, the sign of Cancer painted on them. They are for elsewhere, a white city in the farthest East, a country once again without a name. Set out.
With a sudden awful certainty, Pierce knew that he would sob.
Good Lord, he thought, when it had come and passed, good God where within him had that come from, wrenched from him all unexpected as though by a hand. He wiped his eyes on the shoulders of his shirt, left side, right side, and looked out the mullioned window, his breast still trembling. Out there, Rosie Rasmussen and her daughter tended Kraft’s neglected garden. Sam was crying too.
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.
He stood. He squared up the pile dead Kraft had left, and inserted it again into its box.
It wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t. For if this moment was a moment when it could be true, this moment was also fast passing; and when it had passed all this story of Kraft’s not only would no longer be possible, it would not ever have been possible. There was no way, if the world kept rolling, to save these nested stories; they slipped one by one again into the merely fictional—Hermes’s false Egypt, and Bruno’s false Hermes; Kraft’s false Bruno; Pierce’s false history of the world, the doors that had once blown open blowing closed again one by one down the corridor into the colored centuries.
The rift was closing; this year might be the last year it could even be sensed, this month the last month; and once it had closed there was no messenger from thence who could be believed, I only am escaped to tell thee, for the messenger would be a fiction too, a crazy idea, a notion.
The moment of change, Pierce’s moment, was not itself to survive the change, that’s all. It retreated with the rest into the ordinary, this only world, this actual, which would now be paying out backwards endlessly, all of a piece, all like itself.
Yes.
Except that from now on, not often but now and then, those who have passed through that moment might experience the sharp sense that their lives are in two halves, and that their childhoods, on the far side, lie not only in the past but in another world: a melancholy certainty, for which no evidence can be adduced or even imagined, that the things contained therein, the Nehi orange and the soiled sneakers, the sung Mass, the geography book and the comic book, the cities and towns, the dogs, stars, stones, and roses, are not cognates of the ones the present world contains.
Pierce left the study, and went out through the dark house and into the noontide. Continuously, unnoticeably, at the rate of one second per second, the world turned from what it had been and into what it was to be. Rosie tilted up her sun hat to see Pierce striding from the house, and Sam ceased crying; Spofford at Arcady lifted the instrument cupped in his palms to play.
“Done,” Pierce called. “All done.”
“Us too,” said Rosie; and she held out for him to see what they had looted from Kraft’s garden, huge armfuls of blossoms that would otherwise have fallen unseen, rank poppies and roses, ox-eye daisies, lilies and blue lupines.
John Crowley’s THE ÆGYPT CYCLE from The Overlook Press
“In its entirety, ‘Ægypt’ stands as one of the most distinctive accomplishments of recent decades. It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is as beautifully composed as any novel in my experience.”
—The Washington Post Book World
BOOK TWO OF THE ÆGYPT CYCLE
Coming January 2008
“Crowley is an abundantly gifted writer, a scholar whose passion for history is matched by his ability to write a graceful sentence.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A profound story about childhood mystery, parenthood, love, death, and the unexpected tricks and traps history uses to transform us. John Crowley, I predict, will emerge as American Lit’s next Cormac McCarthy.”
—Spin
ISBN 13: 978-1-59020-015-5
BOOK THREE OF THE ÆGYPT CYCLE
Coming May 2008
“Haunting … Gripping … Astonishing.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Crowley transforms the lead of daily life into seriously dazzling artistic gold.” —Newsday
ISBN 13: 978-1-59020-044-5
BOOK FOUR OF THE ÆGYPT CYCLE
Coming September 2008
“With Endless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us.” —BookForum
/> ISBN 13: 978-1-59020-045-2
“A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique. … The narrative startles the reader again and again with the eloquent rightness of the web of coincidences that structure it.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Meet Pierce Moffett, unorthodox historian and dabbler in ancient astrology, myths, and beliefs. Jilted and newly jobless, Moffett by chance gets off a bus in the Faraway Hills, where he steps into a story that seem to have been waiting for him. When he comes upon an unknown manuscript of local writer Fellowes Kraft, Moffett’s course is charted, as he endeavors to answer a rather curious question:
Is there more than one history of the world?
From the brilliant mind of author John Crowley (author of Little, Big) comes this dazzling story of alternate lives, worlds, and worldviews—at once an absorbing fantasy and a work of high literary ambition. Join Moffett on his journey into Ægypt—an epic flight into the past and into the margins.
“One of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us.”
—BOOKFORUM
“Ægypt is a must; it is a land of questions, more questions and mysteries, because crafting mysteries is what John Crowley, an original moralist of the same giddy heights occupied by the likes of Thomas Mann and Robertson Davies, does best.”
—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Crowley’s prose remains bright and beautiful, absolutely assured.”
—THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
“Extraordinary storytelling.”
—LOS ANGELESTIMES
JOHN CROWLEY was born in the town of Presque Isle, Maine. He is the author of several novels, including Little, Big and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. The Solitudes and Love & Sleep (the second volume of the Ægypt cycle) were enshrined in Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. Crowley teaches at Yale University.
