perceiving the multiplicity of the world and saying to himself: "I'm not from here; I'm from someplace different than this."
The historian Pierce Moffett (apparently the the boy from the second prologue, now an adult) treats the three wishes of childhood fairy tales as a serious philosophical problem, critiquing various approaches (Midas' being obviously the worst of them).
Reflecting on wishes that have overarching, altruistic goals (e.g., world peace) and their potential negative consequences, he recalls a lesson taught him in religious school: "if you will the end you must axiomatically will the means."
On a bus journey from New York City into the "Faraway Hills," Pierce remembers childhood auto journeys from Kentucky to New York city where his father lived --along the new Pennsylvania Turnpike (the primeval illusion of first highways to bypass towns), across the hellish flats of eastern New Jersey and into the Holland tunnel, "like an endless dark bathroom" to New York.
Distinction between yearning and wishing.
Yearning: "a motion of the soul toward peace, resolution, restitution, or rest; a yen for happiness." Wishing, on the other hand, centers on "an object of desire."
Pierce had been teaching at a liberal New York City college where the students were part of "the searching young . . . forming into a colorful nomadic culture of their own, Bedouins camping within the bustle of the larger society, striking their tents and moving on when threatened with the encroachments of civilization."
He is enroute to interview at a more conservative upstate institution, the letterhead of which features an engraved, domed building. Pierce wonders what "new poured-concrete forms and labs it was now immured in."
"Buswrecked" in a small town, Pierce runs into an old student and friend -- Spofford -- who is now a shepard and impulsively decides to abandon the interview: "a runaway mood had been in him all day, all week; all summer for that matter."
Pierce concludes that the third wish -- after wealth and happiness -- should be for oblivion, for forgetting the whole wishing process. He thus imagines that the process of the first two "practical" wishes could already be in the process of fulfillment.
Trying not to be intrusive when interrupting a Buddhist in the Lotus position: "Don't unfold just for me."
Remarkable descriptions of a faded industrial town, Blackbury Jambs, gradually being transformed by the tourist economy.
Resort hotel transformed into sanitarium: two different eras of "rest." The sanitarium declining since the introduction of more powerful drugs: "even the profoundly troubled who cannot live in the world can stay at home now and still float on quiet seas far away."
Of Florida: "his mother had recently drifted with the aged to that land."
Circumstances of Pierce Moffat's departure from he faculty of the liberal college become clear. Invited to participate in an orgy scene for an arty pornography movie, he'd fallen in love with a younger woman in the cast who claims gypsy heritage and supports a champaign life style by trafficing cocaine.
Moffit's downward spiral into debt and addiction fuels composition of a proposed course syllabus to parallel History 101: one that incorporates his new knowledge of gypsy fortune-telling and proposes "there is more than one history of the world." shortly after its submission to the Dean, he is informed he is very unlikely to receive tenure.
In the pages of a Spanish translation that Pierce has been asked to review -- the "Soledades" of Luis de Gongora -- he finds precise echos of his recent history and current dilemma.
Spofford inquires of Pierce what he is reading. He responds: "Pastorals. Poems about sophisticates who leave the city for the country."
Spofford proposes that Pierce move to Blackbury and "set up shop as a historian."
"'Local history,' said Pierce, 'that's a good field. Not mine though,' he added, thinking of it: a field bounded by a low-piled stone wall, long grasses and lichened boulders, an old apple tree. Fireflies glimmering in the thistled darkness. Not his field: his field lay farther off, or closer in, beyond anyway, geometrical paths through emblematic arches, statuary, a dark topiary maze, a gray vista to an obelisk."
As Pierce ponders his plans "the owl, Athena's wisdom bird or obscene bird of night (these Gongorisms are catching, he thought) asked again its single question."
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