Read Online DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle by John Crowley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: John Crowley
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it, shut up or go figure.
“Now it may be,” he typed, “that every other recorded instance of gold made by fire—there are hundreds of them, almost all
seeming to be variants on a few themes, like old comedy plots—maybe every one is false, the product of mendacity or wishful
thinking or the accumulating errors of multiple transmission, history’s game of Telephone that always pushes anecdotes toward
clarity, wonder, or exemplum. Maybe this is the one and only real one we know about, the only one that slipped through that
baffle of advancing Time that falsified all the others, to reach us like Job’s servant out of the wreckage of the former world:
I only am escaped alone to tell thee
.”
He rested, gratified and guilty.
Pierce thought of the readers for whom he wrote as of three kinds. There were, first, all those who were expecting some sweeping
and final change in the ways of the world, had been expecting it ever since a sort of imaginary revolution had, a few years
back, seemed to spread nationwide,worldwide; sometimes (like the heretic Franciscans of old) these took to living as though the old world had already ended,
and the new one begun. In the hills around here were tribes and family groups of them, inhabiting old farms and living in
caves and tree houses; books like the one he planned were about all the reading they had. Then there were the young, a large
contingent, whom Pierce pictured standing just at that crossroads in time to which the young always come, where they are certain,
sure certain, that they are to see and maybe to bring about a world different from the world they were born into. He remembered
his own certainty. And, lastly, there was the permanent and irreducible rump of hopers who can be found in any age, those
who feel Becoming almost as though by a sixth sense or a genetic endowment, always reading the signs, never bored or discouraged,
atremble lifelong with the approach of the next thing.
To this (potentially) large readership Pierce was going to show a New Age that they would be the first to notice dawning,
one they might themselves help to make. He was going speculate that maybe there have been many of these Ages, some short,
some long, some we all can recognize on looking back, and some not. The last one, the one before this one, would have ended
somewhere about the time Helvetius opened his door to the man in the snowy boots. The succeeding age was ending now, now when
Pierce wrote about it, now when he summoned his readers to hear about it. And as this world passed (as it did seem to be passing,
Pierce had a file drawer stuffed with tear sheets from newspapers and journals, impossibilities that could not be accounted
for, holes in Big Science’s increasingly leaky roof—so he thought of them) we would find or make up new Laws, and on them
build a world of a different kind: in fact, as Pierce would explain, the finding and the building
were
the new world.
Did he believe it himself? No, he didn’t, not entirely, not yet. In the (actually rare) moments when he fully grasped what
he was indeed saying, he would often stop writing and stand in mute awe before his own impertinence, or laugh hugely, or quit
work for the day, wary and afraid. No, it actually seemed to him that those first shudders of the coming age that so many
perceived had in fact passed and left the world the same; there had come no irreversible disasters really, no salvations either;
the roads still ran where they had run; life was mostly hard work, and all the odds remained unchanged.
Which didn’t mean that he didn’t share with his readers the longing, whatever its source or name, that the future would be
of a different order than the past; that everything lost could return renewed; that the age to which he belonged was not this
one, but lay far behind thisone, or just ahead. He could not have thought up this thing, whatever it was, if he did not. What
“Now it may be,” he typed, “that every other recorded instance of gold made by fire—there are hundreds of them, almost all
seeming to be variants on a few themes, like old comedy plots—maybe every one is false, the product of mendacity or wishful
thinking or the accumulating errors of multiple transmission, history’s game of Telephone that always pushes anecdotes toward
clarity, wonder, or exemplum. Maybe this is the one and only real one we know about, the only one that slipped through that
baffle of advancing Time that falsified all the others, to reach us like Job’s servant out of the wreckage of the former world:
I only am escaped alone to tell thee
.”
He rested, gratified and guilty.
Pierce thought of the readers for whom he wrote as of three kinds. There were, first, all those who were expecting some sweeping
and final change in the ways of the world, had been expecting it ever since a sort of imaginary revolution had, a few years
back, seemed to spread nationwide,worldwide; sometimes (like the heretic Franciscans of old) these took to living as though the old world had already ended,
and the new one begun. In the hills around here were tribes and family groups of them, inhabiting old farms and living in
caves and tree houses; books like the one he planned were about all the reading they had. Then there were the young, a large
contingent, whom Pierce pictured standing just at that crossroads in time to which the young always come, where they are certain,
sure certain, that they are to see and maybe to bring about a world different from the world they were born into. He remembered
his own certainty. And, lastly, there was the permanent and irreducible rump of hopers who can be found in any age, those
who feel Becoming almost as though by a sixth sense or a genetic endowment, always reading the signs, never bored or discouraged,
atremble lifelong with the approach of the next thing.
To this (potentially) large readership Pierce was going to show a New Age that they would be the first to notice dawning,
one they might themselves help to make. He was going speculate that maybe there have been many of these Ages, some short,
some long, some we all can recognize on looking back, and some not. The last one, the one before this one, would have ended
somewhere about the time Helvetius opened his door to the man in the snowy boots. The succeeding age was ending now, now when
Pierce wrote about it, now when he summoned his readers to hear about it. And as this world passed (as it did seem to be passing,
Pierce had a file drawer stuffed with tear sheets from newspapers and journals, impossibilities that could not be accounted
for, holes in Big Science’s increasingly leaky roof—so he thought of them) we would find or make up new Laws, and on them
build a world of a different kind: in fact, as Pierce would explain, the finding and the building
were
the new world.
Did he believe it himself? No, he didn’t, not entirely, not yet. In the (actually rare) moments when he fully grasped what
he was indeed saying, he would often stop writing and stand in mute awe before his own impertinence, or laugh hugely, or quit
work for the day, wary and afraid. No, it actually seemed to him that those first shudders of the coming age that so many
perceived had in fact passed and left the world the same; there had come no irreversible disasters really, no salvations either;
the roads still ran where they had run; life was mostly hard work, and all the odds remained unchanged.
Which didn’t mean that he didn’t share with his readers the longing, whatever its source or name, that the future would be
of a different order than the past; that everything lost could return renewed; that the age to which he belonged was not this
one, but lay far behind thisone, or just ahead. He could not have thought up this thing, whatever it was, if he did not. What
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