Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt by John Crowley

Author:John Crowley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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When he was at work on his first novel—it was called The Court of Silk and Blood, about the fearsome Catherine de Médicis and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve—Fellowes Kraft began to understand for the first time certain things that Dr. Pons had set out to teach him long before in the house on the hill. For the book he had written—not this book in particular or anything that was done or said within it, but the fact of it, its coming into existence—was just like the appalling universe that man described.

Except for brief moments of ontological doubt such as anyone could have, Kraft had always known that the physical world—this earth and its universe of stars, its gravity and mass and elements, its living and dying stuff—was the base layer of reality. What we think about it is mere evanescence and spindrift; what we hope dies with each day; we impose our inexistent notions and grids upon it, but earth and the flesh abide.

According to Dr. Pons, though, it was actually just the opposite. To him, physical matter had no real existence at all; it wasn't different from human, or divine, ignorance. It was an illusion, in fact a hoax. The slightest and smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul is more real than any aspect of materiality. And more real in turn than all those emotions, all tears and laughter and love and hate, are the conceptions of the mind—Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom—which give to materiality whatever form and worth it has. Most real of all is the world beyond nature and even Mind: the realm Without, utterly out of reach, the realm of the Fullness and God.

What Kraft learned, in his first joyous labors of imagination, was that, different as Dr. Pons's inverted universe might be from what is in fact the case, it is necessarily very much like the world inside a work of fiction.

All the myriad material things that we, in our universe, touch and use and love and hate and depend on—our food, our flesh, our breath; cities and towns, roads and houses, dogs, stars, stones and roses—in a book these things have no true reality at all. They're just nouns. But emotions are quite real; there are tears of things, and they are really shed, and real laughter laughed. Of course. And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, the governing, sustaining reality—the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, its hidden Author.

They, those pretend people in their factitious world, they owe their embodiment, their circumstance of being caught in unreal souls and bodies, to an upheaval that happened before the beginning of space and time (their space and time): a dissatisfaction, a troubling of the Pleroma of a single soul's primal economy, a soul startled into awareness by a girlish or a boyish question: if things were different from the way they are, what would they be like?

More, even more: the most precious and only

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