Prospero breaks his staff: "Endless Things" concludes

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

Last section of "Endless Things" centered on the moment when Prospero "has to drown his book and break his staff." Like Bruno, Dee, and Kraft before him, Pierce leaves magic behind as "when the world has gone on," when one world has ended, "you must live in it without magic." It seems clear at this pointh that both the pagan and the Christian world systems have been expelled, replaced by absence, spiritual remoteness -- a void.

Returning to the Faraway Hills from his European quest, Pierce meets and falls in love with yet another Rose -- Rosamund Corvino (Roo). Pierce, his questing days over, goes to work for a plastics factory and lives at a rundown motel: the Morpheus Arms.

At the wedding of Spofford and Rosie Rasmussen, the local band "The Orphics" have been renamed "The Rude Mechanicals." In a Shakespearean sense, the world now a place for low comedy rather than fairy stories. Spontaneously, Rosie's daughter Sam sings a wordless song "long and lilting, without shape or repeat, and endless melody" a song "not for human ears."

"Sam couldn't know that the song without words she sang was the last breath to be breathed, the last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing."

It is revealed that the scholarly mage Frank Walker Barr -- Pierce's mentor -- has disappeared in Egypt, where he was on an archaeological expedition: another withdrawal of the fantastical from the now thoroughly quotidien world. [And one can't help imagining Beau Brachman's Olds 88 sweeping up through the desert to collect him].

Pierce and Roo travel together to Latin America. On a hike in the mountains, Piece confesses his perverse past loves for the masochist Rose Ryder and his imaginary son Robbie. Roo sees in Pierce's incestuous fantasy a desire for his own father's love; so Robbie as Eros, as magic, dispelled into the language of pop psychology, of recovery.

After Pierce and Roo are married, they travel to Rome, but it too has lost its mystery -- and terror -- for Pierce. In the Campo dei Fiori, site of Giordano Bruno's martyrdom, they come to the statue of the monk, at the base of which is a young couple spoon, sweetly oblivious to the history of the place. Wordlessly, Roo buys flowers, roses, for Pierce to place at the philosopher's feet: "Swallowing in embarrassment and grief, with the incurious eyes of the hylic youth in their beauty upon him, he laid them at the statue's base, and stepped away."

Roo and Pierce return to Latin America to adopt a child and end up becoming parents of twin sisters: Maria (Mary) and Jeusa (who they rename Vita). Washing dishes one night, Pierce, not unaffectionately, tells Roo that in an archetypal sense she is the "crone," the woman in the hero's life that comes after the mother and the beloved and who "humiliates and challenges the hero and charges him with interpreting her commands and unriddling her harsh riddles, to labor under her sanctions until liberated."

To which Roo replies, also not unaffectionately, "that is such bullshit."

At Roo's insistence, Pierce has isolated himself in a retreat house, an Abbey (but of recent construction) to finish the work of sorting through Kraft's final manuscript. "It reminded him of the welcoming and comforting structures of stone and timbers built in the wild places by the government just a few decades before, when labor was cheap and hopes were high, the lodges and the nature centers of state parks, the riparian works and dams, places Pierce loved to come upon as a boy."

While at the Abbey, Pierce once again confronts the Y-shaped moment of decision between salvation (which is also intolerant) and sinfulness (which is also innocent). He looks for counsel from the retreat coordinator, Brother Lewis, who is at first kindly but then sternly condemns his marriage to Roo as "a great wrong" due to her having been previously married. That night, Pierce wanders from the Abbey grounds and finds himself at the "Paradise Lounge," a strip club. His attention focuses on a lap dancer with shaved pubic hair ("Edenic," Pierce thinks). "When you get to hell," the lapdancer says seductively, "mention my name. You'll get a good deal."

Pierce feels exulted for a moment, but then empty. And he has the revelation of how distant creation is from everything we know as meaning.

The "realm in which all is contained" is beyond heaven and beyond meaning, both of which lie within. That realm "provided all that was needed for the world to be, but it touched nothing here. It made nothing, altered nothing, wanted nothing, asked nothing, urged nothing; the fact of its existence beyond existence had nothing to do with what went on here, didn't shine through it as a dome of many-colored glass. No. This world shone with its own light, and its light is all the light there is."

The Y-shaped decision between salvation and damnation has no greater meaning than the world that is becoming. "Here at this place, existence divided in two, before and after, though nothing, not an atom, had changed because of it, or would."

The book ends with a hike up the mountain over Blackbury Jambs to see the monument to one of the town's luminaries -- Hurd Hope Welkin, whose struggles with demons now appear to have been simple psychological delusion. Sam, who could once see spirits is now an anthropologist, who looks for clues to human behavior in evolutionary biology.

The Welkin monument includes a massive harp through which the wind plays in "perfect concord." It marks the closest Pierce and his loved ones can get to heaven.

"They had come up as far as it was possible to go."

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