A jewel, an elixir, a cask, a sleeper

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

Pierce's mother Winnie preoccupied with the problem of the forking path -- of the road not taken -- just as her son riddles through the optimal solution to the problem of the three wishes.

The now eleven year old Pierce receives in the mail, from his generally uncommunitive father in Brooklyn, a copy of a novel by Fellowes Kraft -- "The Werewolf of Prague."

As Pierce reads the epigraph, time's passing slows and the light brightens. "Holding the book in both hands before him, still standing in the same spot, as though rooted to it by a transmission of energy, a summoning beam coming from far away, from the future, passing through the transformer of the book into his being and out through his feet."

Pierce begins reading every book he can get by Fellowes Kraft: "read them one after another, lived within each for a week or two weeks, and forgot it when the next arrived."

"The Werewolf of Prague" begins Pierce's story: the one that will lead him, turning in upon itself, to it's author's library in Blackbury Jambs. In the book's power, he feels his adult self emerge: "the self he felt struggling to extrude itself from the strangling husk of his childhood."

The adult Pierce has forgotten much of his childhood adventures and thoughts. Visiting his mother in Florida, they hear a pelican smack into the water and both have a moment of recall, with Pierce remembering the name of "the wild Kentucky girl," Bobbie, and in that [and this is an unexpected morsel to say the least] "the name of his lost son."

At the insistence of Boney Rasmussen, Pierce has been reading the unfinished manuscript of Fellows Kraft. The ms. Projects that during one of the shifts in the earth's order, at the beginning of the Piscean era, wise men of Alexandria had sought to preserve evidence of the world they realized was extinguishing -- a jewel, an elixir, a cask, a personnage wrapped in changeless sleep.

These relics of AEgypt are again forgotten until in the Renaissance -- as the Piscean era itself fades -- "a new body of wise men" find references to the lost era "in stories and encoded in the obscurities of ancient sciences and the recipes of magic-books."

Seeing roses blooming on an early summer day where brambles had been the day before, Pierce has "a sudden conviction," "a clairvoyance distilled out of that June day" that "something entirely different is coming." Pierce postulates that in such times of change, individuals such as Giordano Bruno, Newton, Galileo have the chance to actually shape how the universe functions.

Going to New York to lunch with the agent and former girlfriend Julie, Pierce runs into his father Axel who, it becomes clear, has been frequenting the gay clubs of late 1970s New York such as The Ninth Circle.

The story is clearly moving toward a quest narrative, but Pierce continues to refuse, to be skeptical of, the role of hero. Panning up to the heavens, "Love & Sleep" listens in briefly on a colloquy of "the powers of that age" who lament Pierce's vascilating nature and predict he will need to pass through a refiner's fire before he has a hope of fulfilling the destiny laid out for him.


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