The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  Pierce was beginning to feel very strange. A sense like déjà vu had overtaken him; a sense that some mental process was disengaging within him, and re-engaging in a different, but not a new, way.

  And yet what have we learned, having learned this? Have we disposed of Plutarch’s story, and the awful prophecy it contains, the anecdote of a world’s passing? I don’t believe it.

  Suppose a man finds a five-dollar bill on a certain street corner at a certain time of day.

  (Definitely, definitely he had read this before, and yet could not remember how it came out.)

  Reason and the laws of probability will tell him that this street corner which has produced for him a chance treasure, is now neither more likely nor less likely than any other street corner in the city to produce another one. It remains a street corner, like others. And yet which of us, on passing our lucky corner at our lucky time of day, would not take a quick look around? A conjunction took place there of ourselves, our desires, and the world; it has acquired meaning; if it produces no more for us, are we not tempted to think we have only used up a magic that it once truly had? 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.

  But history is made by man. Old Vico said that man can only fully understand what he has made; the corollary to that is, that what man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand. So if we look at history and find in it huge stories, plots identical to the plots of myth and legend, populated by actual persons who however bear the symbols and even the names of gods and demons, we need be no more alarmed and suspicious than we would be on picking up a hammer, and finding its grip fit for our hand, and its head balanced for our striking. We are understanding what we have made, and its shape is ours; we have made history, we have made its street corners and the five-dollar bills we find on them; the laws that govern it are not the laws of nature, but they are the laws that govern us.

  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.

  Moses had horns?

  Yes: Pierce could see them, in the darkish photograph of Michelangelo’s statue in the encyclopedia, open before him on the window seat, open before him next to this book, Time’s Body, also open before him, to this page. He was eleven years old; no, twelve. The horns were only buds, a baby ram’s, odd on the huge bearded head: but they were there.

  There was a story. He was seeing it for the first time, there in the window seat, brown winter mountains and a dead garden disappearing without; he didn’t know what the story was, could only imagine it, imagine it unfolding and linking and telling itself vastly and purposefully as thunderheads gathering. A secret story had been going on for centuries, for all time, and it could be known; here was its outline, or part of it, the secrets spilled, or if not the secrets, the secret that there were secrets.

  Pierce in his New York slum rolled a cigarette and lit it, but this grown-up action did not stop the feeling that had come over him, that his jumbled and darkened interior was resolving itself into a series of pictures, a series of magic-lantern slides projected all at once, yet each clear, each in some sense the same slide.

  When he was very small he had been told the story of the man who was caught in a rainstorm and sought shelter in an old barn. He fell asleep in the hayloft, and when he woke it was deep midnight. He saw, walking on the rafters of the barn, a clowder of cats; they would walk the rafters and meet, and seem to pass a message. Then two cats met on a rafter very near where he lay hidden, and he heard one say to the other: “Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead.” And so they parted. When the man got home that day, he told his wife what had happened, and what he had heard the cats say: “Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead.” And on hearing that, their old family cat, dozing by the fire, leaped up with a shriek and cried out: “Then I’m to be king of the cats!” And it shot up the chimney, and was never seen again.

  That story had made him shiver and wonder, and ponder for days; not the story that had been told, but the secret story within it that had not been told: the story about the cats, the secret story that had been going on all along and that no one knew but they.

  That was the feeling he had felt in the window seat, too, having looked up Moses in a dozen places in the old Britannica, and finding that picture, and seeing that horned head, unexplained, unmentioned even in the picture’s caption. They had been there all along, those horns, though he hadn’t known it, and now he did, and there was an explanation for them too that he didn’t know but that he could learn. And that was History.

  And now Pierce coming on that moment, as though breaking open a box that contained it while searching for something else, could measure by it what he had gained, and what he had lost, in the long time that had elapsed between then and now, between that window in Kentucky and this one.

  How was it he had come to lose his vocation?

  He couldn’t turn back now, of course, and find where the thread had been dropped, and pick it up again; time was only one way, and all that he had learned he couldn’t unlearn. And yet. He sat with Barr’s book in his lap, and listened to the silent city, and felt an unreasoning grief: something had been stolen from him, he had stolen something from himself, a pearl of great price, that he had forgotten the value of and had thrown away thoughtlessly, and now could never have again.

  In that year a kind of strange parade seemed to begin in the city. Pierce didn’t at first notice it, or anyway took no notice, though he could sense his students growing restless and inattentive, as if they heard a far-off drum. Now and again he would see, in the corridors or on the steps or in the bookstores where he browsed restlessly, or in the streets of his slum neighborhood, characters who certainly looked as though they were from somewhere else; but Pierce was self-occupied and didn’t ponder them. He went through his classes and through the streets like a cartoon character who in the thought-cloud over his head bears only a single question mark. Once in a crowded corridor he became so annoyed with himself that he had to counsel himself aloud sternly just to drop it, for God’s sake, and calm down: and realized in the next moment, as coeds with books pressed to their breasts turned to stare at him, that he had no idea what it was that he should drop: what it was that he had picked up.

  He hadn’t lost his vocation, he had only grown up; he had desired to grow up and there would have been no way to prevent it even if he hadn’t desired it. History, that undiscovered country he had seen far off—yes, it had turned out to be only ordinary, different from his own not in kind but only in mundane details of geography and local custom, lists of which he had had to commit to memory: he knew it, for he had explored that country, of course, just as he had wanted to; he lived there every working day.

  His progress had always been outward, away from stories, from marvels; it had been a journey, as he saw it, away from childhood, the same journey outward that the human race had long been on, and which he, Pierce Moffett, was only recapitulating in his own ontogeny, joining up with it, at his maturity, at the place it had by then reached.

  When I was a child, I thought as a child and did as a child; but now I am a man, and have put away childish things.

  There had been a story in the beginning—in his own childhood and the human race’s—that a
child could inhabit, an account that could be taken literally, about Adamuneve and Christopher Clumbus and a sun with a face and a moon with one too, a stock of stories never discarded but only outgrown, gratefully, name by face, like an old sunsuit. Stories, outgrown just as grownups had always hinted he would outgrow them when with fierce literalness he would try to get one or another outlandish detail certified or explained; stories, their aging fabric giving under his fingers. On a certain Christmas Eve, when an argument had been raging in the children’s quarters, Sam Oliphant had taken him upstairs into his big bedroom, and explained carefully about Santa Claus, and the explanation seemed not only true but a sort of relief, like breaking out of an egg; he was being admitted into a larger circle of the world. Only don’t tell the little kids, Sam said, because they’re still young, and it would spoil it for them.

  And then further on he had come forth again, from a larger story, about God and Heaven and Hell, the Four Cardinal Virtues and the Seven Glorious Mysteries and the nine choirs of the angels. All in a day, it seemed on looking back: all in a day he had stepped outside it all, with a sigh of relief and a twinge of loss and a nod of resolution that he would not turn back that way now even if he could, and he could not, it was too small to go back into, an intricate clockwork sphere that he would carry within him then like an old-fashioned turnip watch, which he could draw out and look at, in perfect working order, only stopped forever.

  And on: passing outward through vast realms of meaning, through the circles of history, not only Christopher Columbus who found out the world was round, not only the Founding Fathers and their awful wisdom, but 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.

  And came then at last to the furthest outside of all, the limitless one, the real world. About which nothing could be said, because in order to reach it he, he and the human race, whose progress he was joining just at this point, had had to pass through every universe that could be talked about. He had them all within him; he had outgrown them all; naked, he looked outward toward silence and random stars.

  He had got something fearfully wrong.

  Knowing nothing then of what he would later learn of the techniques of Climacterics, Pierce could not chart his distemper, though in looking back he could see clearly enough what had happened to him: he had simply fallen off his twenty-first-year Plateau, his Third Climacteric. The rough synthesis he had made at Noate, the “existential” pose and the know-nothing knowingness, had come apart as his black clothes had come apart. The sine curve of his life had turned downward like a roller-coaster, plummeting him through his Down Passage Year and into the slough beyond. By the spring of 1967 he was well within it.

  When classes ended that June, he went back to Noate, to finish up and annotate his thesis, to get it published and approved (just barely) on the strength of its stylish patterning and minute though sometimes fanciful analysis. It seemed a dead object to him, and the labor he expended on it only increased the sensation, it was pietra dura work or Chinese nesting ivory spheres, but it was done. From Noate’s library and cloisters (Barr was on sabbatical) he heard the tinkling and piping of the paraders, as though far off; someone told him that in the Quad there had been, while he cut ivory in the library, a Dow demonstration, or a Tao demonstration, he wasn’t sure which.

  But the music was loud in the streets of his slum. The city had gathered up its filthy skirts and arisen griping and rheumaticky, and begun altogether to move: the building opposite Pierce’s, whose gray face he knew almost as well as he knew his own, had come, while he was gone, to be painted in stars, sunbursts, polka dots; the old stone heads that had hidden like dark dryads under the eaves had had their eyes opened with bright paint and looked out surprised. There were transients everywhere, pilgrims in strange clothes, but Pierce’s part of the city in particular resembled a medieval city on a fair day or high holy day, there were pénitentes in orange robes and shaven heads chanting and whirling in St. Vitus’s dance, there were Gypsies come to town camped in the littered squares, furred feathered and earringed, shaking tambourines and stealing things. There were hawkers and jugglers and smokesellers, there were women in long homespun dresses and brass bangles who squatted on the stoop of his building, suckling their babes; there were madmen and friars of orders gray and ragged beggars asking alms.

  Pierce read on. Printing had been invented, and the bookstores were suddenly full of odd wares. There were new news-sheets in lurid, smudgy colors, there were almanacs and books of prophecy, there were strange scriptures, ballads, broadsides. Deeply surprised, Pierce began to find among them bright-clad reissues of books that had meant much to him in childhood, a childhood that had been largely spent between the covers of books, one way and another, a childhood he found he was able to taste again by cracking the same books, unseen since antiquity, since his own Age of Gold.

  Here for example were Frank Walker Barr’s ten- and twenty-year-old books, being reverently brought out in a uniform new paper edition, including the ones Pierce knew, like Time’s Body and Mythos and Tyrannos; someone had had the brilliant idea of covering them all with a single titanic Baroque painting crowded with figures, each volume’s cover only a detail, so that when they were all in print and assembled, they would form the whole picture. And here also was Sidney Lanier’s Boy’s King Arthur, with all the original illustrations, as bright as Christmas morning and as cold to his touch; a shabby edgeworn copy had stood long on his boyhood bookshelf, a present from his father. And a book he didn’t at first recognize in its new soft covers, only to find inside a book he knew immediately, like a childhood friend unmasked, because it was simply a photo reproduction of the old one he had read. It was Bruno’s Journey, a biography of sorts, by the historical novelist Fellowes Kraft, and he remembered nothing of it but that he had once been deeply affected by it; what he would think of it now he had no idea. The page he had opened to was this:

  The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had inverted the universe—what was it but joy in the confirmation of his knowledge that Mind, in the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of? If the Earth, the old center, now was seen truly to revolve somewhere halfway between the center and the outside; and the Sun, which before had revolved on a path halfway to the outside, were now the center, then a half-turn like that in a Mobius strip was thrown into the belt of the stars: and what then became of the old circumference? It was, strictly, unimaginable: the Universe exploded into infinitude, a circle of which Mind, the center, was everywhere and the circumference nowhere. The trick mirror of finitude was smashed, Bruno laughed, the starry realms were a jewelled bracelet in the hand.

  Copyright 1931. Who was publishing these things newly? How did they know he needed them? Why did he see their spines under the arms and in the tasseled satchels of the effendi, woodsmen, Injuns of the gong-tormented streets? He had the funny feeling that doors long bolted within him were being forced, that in the general amnesty of carnival something jailed in him since puberty was being let out—somewhat by mistake—into the open air, to be welcomed by the cheering mob.

  Something: what?

  When the weather turned cold the jingling throngs sought shelter, huddling wrapped in aged furs on stoops or in heated public places; Pierce took in the odd stray for a night or a week. Boys with head colds, far from home, boiled brown rice on his stove, girls practiced simple native crafts cross-legged on the floor, shared the bed, moved on. In their endless talk, period-less, a slurry of outlandish possibilities as real to them as the dangerous city and the workaday world around them were unreal, Pierce with elation and trepidation heard the end—not of the world, no, but of the world he had grown up in, the world that everyone, growing up, imagines will never change. Climacterics would one day suggest to him that the world forever grows up and explodes into possibility, revolts against the past, e
volves the future, and settles down to grow staid and old, all at exactly the same rate as each person experiencing it does; but Pierce didn’t know Climacterics then; he let his hair grow long, and looked out his window at the parade, and thought: Nothing now will ever be the same again.

  FIVE

  Barnabas College, like a fast little yacht, quickly tacked with the new winds that were blowing, even while old galleons like Noate were wallowing in the breakers. Courses in the history, chemistry, and languages of the old everyday world were semester by semester cut to a minimum (Pierce’s History 101 course would, eventually, very nearly reach the present day from time-out-of-mind, even as the 200-level courses, out of his provenance, came to deal chiefly not with the past at all but in possibilities, in the utopias and armageddons all adolescents love). The old standard textbooks were chucked, replaced by decks of slim paperbacks, often the students’ own choices, they are after all (said Doctor Sacrobosco) paying the bills. Veteran teachers faced with this fell tongue-tied or turned coats garishly; young ones like Pierce, his students’ coeval almost, still had trouble facing children who seemed to have come to Barnabas chiefly to be instructed in a world of their own imagining.

  Earl Sacrobosco tried to help him out. “You’re not plastic enough,” he told Pierce, molding something invisible in his hands. “The kids want to play with these ideas that are new to them. So play with them. Entertain them.”

  “Entertaining students is not my idea of …”

  “The notions, Pierce. Entertain the notions.”

  Sacrobosco himself taught an astronomy course that was, at his students’ insistence, coming to include practical training in judicial astrology, so he knew whereof he spoke. Earl was as plastic as they come. Pierce did his best, he could entertain notions, he could and did, but he continued to think of his course as a history course, on the model of those he had taken under Frank Walker Barr at Noate: a history course, however commodious and full of digression. His students apparently wanted something else. They liked the stories he was gleaning from his newly wide reading, and made round sounds of wonder at the notions he put forth, which they entertained indiscriminately, mixing them with their other mental guests in a bash that Pierce found hard to crash. They had come to college not, as Pierce’s generation seemed to Pierce to have gone to college, to be disabused of their superstitions, but to find new and different ones to adopt; they seemed not to understand the nature of evidence, and were vague about whether the Middle Ages came before or after the Renaissance; they were resentful of Pierce’s careful distinctions, and insulted when he showed himself to be appalled at their ignorance. “But this is a history course,” he would plead before their truculent faces. “It is about past time and what has in fact occurred. Stories told about that past time are no good unless they can account for events that really happened, which we therefore have to learn, which is why we study history in the first place. Now about this other stuff, maybe in Dr. Sacrobosco’s course or Mrs. Black’s course on the Witch Cult as a Women’s Movement …” But after class they would crowd around his desk, uncowed, bringing him news of Atlantis, the secrets of the pyramids, the Age of Aquarius.