As I’ve stated before in these “pages”, I’ve been reading John Crowley quite a bit lately. Little Big (read in July/August 2007) is what started me off, and, after several false starts, I dove deep this past July into his monolithic “AEgypt” series. I read three of the four books on vacation and started the fourth when I returned home. Because I was back in the real world of duties and commitments, I naturally felt less of an urgency to finish the final book, Endless Things. In fact, the further I got into the book, the more I began dreading finishing it, but not in the way one normally dreads the impending conclusion of an extraordinary novel. This dread was borne of an irrational fear that when it ended, something in my life would end too; somehow, a fire would be extinguished.

“AEgypt”, to me, is nothing less than a sign, or series of signs, the meaning of which my soul, or unconscious, or little guy at the psychic helm, has understood right along. One of the things that Crowley’s main character, the anti-hero Pierce Moffett finally comes to realize is that, contrary to the hero-myth trope where the treasure that the hero seeks is finally understood to be the journey itself, his particular circumstances are such that the only way to obtain what he has been searching for – his own Philosopher’s Stone – is to not get it, to let it go. This paradox is what I’ve been feeling while coming close to the final 200 pages of Crowley’s series. So, I’ve stopped. I’ve no doubt that I will pick it up again someday, ideally in my old age (that just somehow seems right), and finish it. When the little guy tells me it’s time.

Like the coins on the ground that one finds with surprising frequency once one makes a concerted effort to keep an eye out for them, I’ve been finding extensions and examples of the many ideas with which Crowley has infused the “AEgypt” series in some pretty unlikely places. I’ll delve into a few of these in the next PftB entries.