Born in a year with a low number of conceptions due to the war, "he was too young to be a beatnick; later he would find himself too old, and too strictly reared to be a hippie. He came to consciousness in a moment of uneasy stasis, between existential and communal, psychoanalytic and psychedelic."
Pierce's questions about alternative histories come to him from his mentor Frank Barr -- perhaps a Joseph Campbell figure? -- and occupy his thoughts unbidden. Re-reading one of Barr's books during his first year teaching at Barnabas College, he comes across the story from Plutarch of a Greek mariner in the reign of Tiberius (the era when Christ is born) passing an island and being commanded, amid loud lamentations, to tell his countrymen that "the Great God Pan is dead."
Pierce's loss of his vocation for history, his prodigality, in the trajectory of history from story and myth to fact and statistic -- the imperative as an adult "to put away childish things."
"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."
Acquiring of knowledge an act of "passing through the circles of history . . . 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."
Leaving college and returning to New York, Pierce discovers "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 or 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."
As the "Age of Reason" is assailed by the tummult of the 1960s, Pierce begins to look for the other path of history, the lost one of stories, the "history not made of time" that lies alongside the factual accounts of people, events, movements backward toward prehistory. The second path forks away, "just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, to him as to others."
This history is made of internal stories -- "the stories inside which the human race has never completely wakened from" -- that are closed off from consciousness as part of adulthood, as part of the Piscean (A.D.) era. As Pierce pursues them in old books, he feels the closed doors of abandoned knowledge opening.
He begins to dwell on the lost kingdom of the gypsies, AEgypt, a place of mystical knowedge which is not to be confused with the materialist Egypt of the Pharoahs. And he realizes this AEgypt is a country he knows, his own lost kingdom of childhood, when he formed as a secret society among his cousins an "Invisible College" in which stories, not facts, are the course of study. The college sessions, which take place when the cousins are supposed to be sleeping, "come to an abrupt end" when Pierce is sent away to a religious prep school.
AEgypt, "the country where all the magic arts are known," has fallen and its people are in exile, yet "they still carry with them, in however degraded a form, the skills their ancestors had." Similarly the AEgypt of childhood, the land of stories, exists locked within adults.
Similarly relativism, as perceived centuries before Einstein by Giordano Bruno, reveals that life has not one irreversible path but "extends out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant."
Walking along the dirt road from Spofford's cabin, Pierce "felt his childhood returned to him as he walked: not so much in concrete memories, though many of those too, as in a series of past selves, whose young being he could taste in the breaths of air he drew."
Spofford takes him to a party near the river at which Adamite, prelapsarian revels are underway and a piper , the Buddhist Beau, plays Pan flutes. There he meets Rose, who has been reading the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, who is also among the writers Pierce has been reading.
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