" The world turns from what it had been into what it was to be" -- "The Solitudes" ends

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VIII

At a balloon ascension in the hills above Blackbury Jambs, Pierce Moffat meets up with the would-be shepard Swofford and it becomes apparent that there are two Roses and, in certain ways, a Trinity of Roses: Rose, Rosie, and Rosalie.

After reading the incomplete last ms. of Fellows Kraft, Pierce reflects on whether the world "might just now be on the turn again: for it would only be in such moments of turning -- when not only all possible futures come into view but all possible pasts as well -- that the previous moments of turning become visible."

Finishing his reading of Fellows Kraft's ms., Pierce wonders (and the same could be ruefully said of the AEgypt Cycle itself) "what public, he wondered, had Kraft thought he was writing for . . . For it wasn't a good book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world."

Pierce considers whether he truly came to Blackbury Jambs to write a book or to read one: "his whole life up to this time, the religion he had been born into, the stories he had learned and made up and told, the education he had got or avoided, the books somehow chosen for him to read, his taste for history, and the colored dates he had fed it on, the drugs he had taken, the thoughts he had thought, had all prepared him not to write a book at all, as he had thought, but to read one. This one. This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that each be the one book he required, his own book."

Pierce imagines a Noah-like flood that ends the world as we know it, with the heroes of the age gathered up to sail to a distant refuge. Just as Giordano was "the harbinger, messenger to the future, sure that the age to come will bring more magic, not less" so another epoch is heralded "by those who cried the new age in Pierce's own time." ( the time of the current-day events in "The Solitudes" has been established as 1978).

Sense that the emerging world might actually lie in the lost world of childhood, "the sharp sense that their lives are in two halves, and that their childhoods, on the far side, lie not only in the past but in another world . . . that the things contained therein, the Nehi Orange and the soiled sneakers, the sung Mass, the geography book and the comic book, the cities and towns, the dogs, stars, stones, and roses, are not cognates of the ones the present world contains."

Pierce walks out of Fellows Kraft's study into the sunlight, sees Rose and her daughter Sam, and hears the the harmonica of the shepherd Swofford, in the role of Pan. And "continuously, unnoticeably, at the rate of one second per second, the world turns from what it had been into what it was to be."

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