Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  * * * *

  All the while, that world went on ceasing to be what it had been and becoming instead what it was to be. It had been winter back when Pierce first went to Europe, all those old states under snow; the worldwide spring that had seemed to sprout universally in his own twenty-sixth or Up Passage Year had by then already turned back and blasted by a cold wind from the east that then just went on blowing. Prague in Winter, said the New York Times Magazine one Sunday in 1979 after Pierce returned, having not however gone there, and the big pages showed the snow thick on the palaces and the statues he hadn't seen, the people in the cobbled streets bent into the wind and the weather. It was the deep cold in the bones that was meant too, the despair as things got only worse, the hunkering down to survive, to not waste energy; the resolve to wait and hope, or to forget hope; the temptation to eat the dog, and maybe the neighbor too. Unicuique suum in the jailer states of socialism.

  Winter; spring. Barr had written, in the old book that in another winter Pierce was rereading in memoriam, that human culture turns centrally on the transformation of biological and physical facts into systems of opposition. Higher, lower; pure, impure; male, female; alive, dead; dark, light; youth, age; night, day; earth, heaven. In the economy of meaning these were the counters; the world is maintained as it is in the keeping apart of these pairs, and shocked into change by the combining or dissolving of them. There are certain scholars (J. Kaye, 1945, e.g.) who posit a principle in history that might be called the Law of Conservation of Meaning, by analogy with the principle in physics regarding the conservation of matter. There is, this principle holds, a certain fixed amount of meaning existing in a society's life; when it is subtracted or leaches out in one place, it merely outcrops in another; what religion loses, science or art or nationalism gains; when selfless acts of civil heroism are emptied of meaning by an age of cynicism or analytical criticism or social despair, then the lost meaning will be found in selfless acts of nihilism, or in the worship of the dandy or the hermit. And just as none is ever lost, so no new meaning is ever created; what seem to be brand-new vessels of meaning—in various ages alchemy, or psychiatry, or socialism—are only catchments for meaning that has evaporated elsewhere unnoticed.

  And in 1989, the old ironbound empire rusted away, all in a few months; it had lost meaning even for those who most depended on its continuance, who couldn't bring themselves to call out the armies to defend it, and went to prison or exile or into the arms of their former victims with stunned expressions, you saw them every night on television, as one by one the sets were struck behind them, their cosmos rolled up as a scroll to reveal reality behind, shabby, scabby, blinking, like the prisoners let out from their dungeons in Fidelio, but right there where it had been all along. The elation of hearing human voices speaking, not in the accents of revolution or revenge but of plain humanity, civility, sense, as though you were truly face to face with them. Surely it was only because we here had not been paying attention that it seemed so sudden, whole regimes evanescing overnight and in the streets commonsensical smiling men and women young and old saying obvious things to cameras, surrounded by tens and hundreds of thousands of others.

  So it happened: a new age really did begin, just as Pierce had once been tempted to promise in a book, no matter that he could actually have neither imagined nor foreseen it. And it began in Prague, there where it must, golden city, everyone's best city, city of the past and future become the present at last: just as if they had found and brought forth the stone of transformation, had known all along where it had been kept, as we all do. Václav Havel and his fellows met and spoke and argued and smoked like steam trains in their favorite spelunkas and then they held their forums in the Realistic Theater. Some theaters are more realistic than others. Or they met to make their plans and imagine an as yet nonexistent civil society in the basement of another theater, the Magic Lantern. The magic lantern was first described in 1646 by Athanasius Kircher, who succeeded Kepler as mathematician in chief to the Hapsburg court, and who decoded or thought he had decoded the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The magic lantern is pictured in his book Ars magna lucis et umbrae, the Great Art of Light and Dark, and in his illustration of the invention (p.768), the slide that is projected against a wall for some reason shows a soul suffering in Purgatory, raising his arms to ask for prayers, the prayers that will free him.

  Light, darkness. In that autumn, in a Prague shop window, a poster appeared, showing a big number 89, and on it the word Autumn; arrows were drawn around it to show how it could be turned right around, and 89 would become 68, and on it when it was upended was the word Spring.

  And then Mary and Vita were seven years old, and asleep in their small beds, and Pierce Moffett was preparing his midterms in Shakespeare and in world history, and Rosie Rasmussen called to give him a job.

  10

  Endings are hard. Everybody knows. It's probably because in our own beginningless endless Y-shaped lives things so rarely seem to end truly and properly—they end, but not with The End—that we love and need stories: rushing toward their sweet conclusions as though they rushed toward us, our eyes damp and breasts warm with guilty gratification, or grinning in delight and laughing at ourselves, and at them too, at the impossible endings; we read and we watch and we say in our hearts, This couldn't happen, and we also say, But here it is, happening.

  When in his abbey cell he had set out on Kraft's typescript, Pierce thought it was going to turn out to be like a work out of the former age of the world, one of those vast ones like The Faerie Queene or The Canterbury Tales, which are unfinished but not therefore necessarily incomplete, their completion actually hovering perceptibly around them like a connect-the-dots puzzle half connected, or like the ghost limb that amputees feel, only not amputated but never grown. And he thought that maybe if Kraft could himself have ended it, it might have been in that way, so that what he had left undone would be clear.

  But no, it wasn't like any of those works. That was obvious to him now, now having reached the end of it again, again. It wasn't like any work of the former age. Nor was it a work of the first age, like one of those endlessly cycling epics that Barr used to talk about, with simply no reason to end. Rather it seemed to be trying to become a work of the age now beginning, the age to come, which it and other works like it (not only in prose or on paper) would bring into being, of which the new age would at length be seen to consist: works that don't cycle or promise completion as the old stories or tales did, nor that move as ours do by the one-way coital rhythms of initiation, arousal, climax, and inanition, but which produce other rhythms, moving by repetition, reversal, mirror image, echo, inversion: vicissitudes of transformation that can begin at any point, and are never brought to an end at all, but just close, like day.

  At the close of an August day a lot of years before, in Kraft's own study in his house in Stonykill in the Faraway Hills, Pierce had first read these pages Kraft had piled up in his last year or two and put into a copy-paper box. He had wept to discover in them a country he had once lived in, a country too far ever to reach again, even walking backward forever. And he had asked then, asked of no one, why he must live always in two worlds, a world outside himself that was real but never his own, and another within, one that was his, but where he could not stay. This old question. Rosie Rasmussen was out in Kraft's garden that day, he could see her from the window of that small room where he sat: she and Samantha her daughter, gathering flowers from Kraft's overgrown garden.

  But there is only one world. Was, is, will be: a world without end. Kraft's book was finished; Kraft had finished it. It was without end but it was finished.

  He left his cell, the face-down pile of papers and the glowing engine, and went through the silent halls to the little cubby where the phone was. He dialed Rosalind Rasmussen's number.

  "Hello?"

  Dim sleepy possibly alarmed voice. Pierce thought of or felt another time he'd awakened her by phone, far later than this: Brent Spofford beside her t
hen, as he probably was now.

  "Hi, Rosie. Sorry if it's late. It's Pierce."

  "Oh. No. It's fine. I fell asleep in front of the TV."

  A silence. He sensed her rubbing sleep from her eyes and brain. “So."

  "So."

  "How's it going?"

  "Well, interesting. Rosie, it's finished."

  "Oh. Wow. You've got it all copied? You're done with it?"

  "I mean it's finished,” Pierce said. “Kraft didn't leave it unfinished. It's a finished work."

  "But you said it was a mess."

  "I know. I didn't understand it."

  "Well.” Pause for thought, or yawn. “If you didn't, is anybody else going to?"

  "I don't know. I don't know if it's successful. I don't know if it's good. But I know he finished it."

  "There were lots of things left unresolved. In the story."

  "Yes."

  A soft silence like an erasing wave.

  "So we can publish it now?” she asked.

  "Well, it's finished,” he said. “But now I'm not."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Now that I understand it,” he said, “I have to go back and take out a lot of my improvements."

  "Oh really? That might make it worse."

  "Well. Maybe."

  "Why did he write it that way? If it takes so long to understand."

  "Mercy,” Pierce said. “I think."

  "Mercy?"

  Mercy. Kraft knew that endings, all endings, trap characters in completions, and he wanted not to bind them but to free them. Not merely to end their stories in freedom, in the way that stories often do end, as several even of Kraft's own earlier books had ended—a door opens, dawn breaks, the road unrolls ahead, The End—but never to end them at all.

  Mercy. Because there is an end to justice and to fairness, when everything is paid out, and all accounts are settled: but there's no end to mercy.

  "You okay?"

  "Yes. Yes. So. I'll bring you this."

  "Okay."

  "A couple more weeks. Spring break is over soon, I have to go home, go to work. But I'll keep at this."

  "Okay. Come over when you want. Bring the family. What's-their-names."

  "Vita and Mary."

  "We'll have a day. The daffodils will be out up on Mount Randa. They're kind of famous. We can walk up to the Welkin Monument."

  "Oh yes."

  "You've been there?"

  "I've never seen it. I've gone up the mountain. I never got that far."

  "Hurd Hope Welkin,” she said. “The Educated Shoemaker. The monument's really something. A surprise, when you finally get there. I won't tell you."

  "Rosie,” Pierce said. “I want to thank you."

  "For what? You haven't even got the check yet."

  "For making me do this. To find the way to finish it. I never would have, and it would have followed me to the other side, undone."

  "The other side?” Rosie asked drily.

  "Anyway, thanks,” Pierce said. “It was just in the nickel-dime."

  * * * *

  On the various occasions he had walked the halls of the Retreat House, going to and from the abbey church and the refectory, Pierce had passed the door of the retreat master's office, and noticed, when the door was open, the immobile figure of a white-haired monk within. The door said Welcome. Pierce had not responded; one of the things he had ascertained about visits here before he signed up was that the monks asked nothing of retreatants except reverence and silence—beyond that, your experience was your own. He had spoken to no one, and no one had spoken to him. Returning from the phone now, though, he paused there, surprised to find the office open for business, and in that moment the brother within saw him there, and raised his eyebrows and smiled. Rather than spurn the evident invitation in his look, too late to merely amble on, Pierce entered.

  "Would you like to sit?” the man said. No tonsure nowadays; an ordinary businessman's haircut. He was older than Pierce had at first thought; maybe very old. “You might shut the door."

  Pierce sat.

  "I'm Brother Lewis."

  "Pierce Moffett."

  "Have you come with the CFM group?"

  "No. I'm a singleton."

  "Ah.” Brother Lewis had a soft, unblinking gaze, and his head hung a little forward on the skinny bent neck that emerged from his robe's wide folds, so he looked a little like a kindly vulture. “You're making a personal retreat?"

  "In a way. I mean yes, that's how I'd describe it."

  "Are there any particular concerns you're thinking about?"

  "I don't think there are any I can discuss, really."

  "Are you a practicing Catholic? I only ask for information's sake."

  "Actually no.” He should by now be feeling very uncomfortable, but he didn't. An odd sweetness was within him. “I was raised Catholic but don't practice now much. At all."

  Brother Lewis had not ceased to gaze upon him compassionately. The Trappists were known for the welcome they extended to all forms of religious rapture, and invited Zen monks and Sufis to speak; at their silent meals Rumi as well as Julian of Norwich and Böhme were read aloud. “But you haven't ceased seeking,” he said.

  "I don't know,” Pierce said. “I'm not sure I know what that means. I know that I don't consider myself to be a believer. I don't think I believe in God. If I'm a seeker then what I've sought—or anyway what I've been gladdest to find—is evidence that God doesn't probably exist."

  Brother Lewis blinked slowly. “Well, you can't mean that you can conceive of no creator of the universe."

  No answer.

  "I mean how does all this come to be? Just chance?"

  "I don't know,” Pierce said. “I don't know anything about how the universe came to be."

  Brother Lewis closed his hands together before him with great slow care, and for a moment Pierce thought he might pray. But he still only looked at Pierce, maybe a shade more interrogatively.

  "It's when I seem to myself to find some clear reason—in biology, or history, or psychology, or language—for why a religious belief, or a notion about God, might be pervasive, or convincing to people, even though it's really insupportable, or even dumb—that's when I feel I've hit the truth. That I'm on the path. Mostly."

  This felt like a great relief to say, here, and Pierce even fetched a sigh when he had done. Brother Lewis nodded, then propped his cheek on his fist, which seemed a very unmonklike, or lay, gesture.

  "Has it occurred to you that this might be work toward God as well?” he asked.

  Pierce said nothing.

  "I mean the discreating of false creations about God? Refuting false statements, rumors you might say, skeptically? It is, in fact, a way toward God, or it can be. Many mystics have understood this. Saint Thomas himself said that it is proper and right to say that God is not: not good, not big, not wise, not loving. Because these things limit God to the definitions of those words. And God is beyond all definitions."

  "The via negativa,” Pierce said.

  "You've heard of it.” Brother Lewis said this indulgently, as you might to someone who had tossed out extravehicular activity or death row or cast away. So that Pierce made no nod in return. “I wonder if you have thought how hard a way it is, though. Very lonely, for a long time, as God loses his familiarity. Not loving, not good. Maybe you know."

  No answer.

  "In our spiritual practice,” Brother Lewis said, “we sometimes are filled with sensations, of love, of goodness, of sweetness. Of rightness. All problems seem resolved, all matters clear. Tears of joy. God's love for you. And a spiritual director might say to you then, well you're very fortunate to have these moments, and you should be grateful for them. But the goal lies farther on, and has little to do with any of this. And when it's reached there will be nothing at all to say."

  No answer. Either (Pierce thought) this is so, and I have gone partway without knowing it, and will never truly rest till I go on, or I'm not doing anything li
ke the thing these guys do, whatever exactly that is, and never have.

  God.

  "Well, tell me,” Brother Lewis said, and crossed one leg over the other, which made his beads rattle, “tell me a little of yourself. Your circumstances."

  "Ah. Well. I'm, a teacher. History and literature. In a community college. And."

  "Are you married?"

  "Yes. I have two daughters. Adopted."

  Brother Lewis seemed neither to approve nor disapprove.

  "I am actually my wife's second husband,” Pierce said. “She was married once before. Very briefly and unfortunately."

  "Oh?” Brother Lewis's attention was caught. His vulture's head bent closer to Pierce. “So you weren't married in the church."

  "Well, no. She's divorced, and..."

  "You aren't then truly married. You're living in sin."

  Hard to tell if Brother Lewis was shocked, but it was evident he was certain.

  "Um,” Pierce said, and lifted his hands in a miniature got-me-there gesture.

  "You can't continue to live with her,” Brother Lewis said. “You can urge her to return to her former husband, to whom, of course, she's still married. I don't need to quote Scripture to you. In any case you are doing her a great wrong."

  "Ah well,” Pierce said.

  "I'm obliged to say this."

  "Ah. Well."

  Before Pierce could address the matter, Brother Lewis, one knee clasped in his hands, looked upward, thinking; and he said:

  "You could of course go on living with her, but as brother and sister. That would be acceptable. But it might not be easy."

  "No,” Pierce said. “Maybe not."

  "This is where prayer comes in,” Brother Lewis said.

  Pierce made no answer. The sweetness he had at first perceived in Brother Lewis, that stilled fear and revulsion, hadn't ceased flowing, but Pierce wondered if maybe it was coming not from the monk but from himself, the layman. He almost laughed aloud, as though the flow of it outward were ticklish. Brother Lewis put his long strange old hand over Pierce's where it lay.