"Life is dreams checked by Physics"

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

Val, the local astrologer, has been taking books out of the library to study up on love (there being, oddly, no house of love in the arcana). Rosie notices: "the distinctive white paint of the librarian who had long ago carefully lettered the call numbers on the spine, and was for a moment touched. Not many people took out books with such numbers on them." From the description of its contents and organization, the book would appear to be that of Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle, poured-over by Pierce in his boyhood.

One step backward from Val's Dewey-numbered book is the idiosyncratic order of Fellows Kraft's library, of which Pierce notes "Kraft's system of classifying his books was unknown to Dewey and other pedants. And yet it was, must have been, a system."

Boney in the cardiac unit at the hospital. Rosie feels responsible for him as nearly his last living relation: "almost everybody else he knew was dead already; there were far more ready to welcome him on the other side than to say goodbye."

The novel of Colona in Kraft's library, the Hypnerotomachia -- sleep, love, struggle. Recommended to Pierce, when a student, by his mentor Frank Barr. Also relates to Pierce's propensity toward wet dreams, the inevitable result of his curent chastity.

Pierce first dreams of, then receives a call asking for money from his old gypsy girlfriend who is twinned with the agent Julie just as the two Rose's are first conflated in the society of the Faraway Hills.

The Buddhist Beau draws his cosmology of concentric circles for Pierce. In a spiritual vision fueled by a Mahler symphony, he'd seen the original division of Adam in two, man and woman, waking and sleep.

Spofford: "wanting is life, Rosie. Dreams are life . . . Life is dreams checked by physics."

Pierce's revelation that an infinite God can actually be small. "You got no closer to God by imagining something huge, then something huger, then something hugest. . . . Infinitesimal is infinite too; infinite spark at the core or reality."

Pierce imagines God as a nine year old girl -- similar to the spirit that visits Dr. Dee and his skyrer Kelly (formerly Talbot) and warns them to flee England.

Dee's child spirit Madimi acts through books: "they had seen her first among books; she read to them out of books; she was a book angel somehow." She urges them across Europe, her grasp of knowledge sometimes inconsistent or erring (raising anew the question of whether the skyrer Kelly is a fraud).

Dee senses the great change in the universe: "If God meant now to roll up the heavens as a scroll, if He was now at work doing that, and a new heavens was to be revealed behind the old; if there was no longer to be lower and higher, up and down, no longer any measure by which a place in the universe could be found -- no more four corners to the world -- then men would have to be new too.

"Was God about to grant men new powers?. . . How would they use it? Please God they did no harm."

Dee's prayer: "O God let not sharp swords be put in the hands of children; let their hearts be made wise before their hands are made strong."

Dee and Kelly make their way to Prague and the court of Rudolph II.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry