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(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

So to even begin understanding today's essay, you need to first understand the following -- that what we now know as modern "science," back when it was invented in the 1500s, was in fact mostly a religious pursuit when it was first created. See, such deep thinkers back then ultimately wanted to be closer to God, and that led them to closely studying the way that God works out in nature; and since they wanted to share these discoveries with other deep thinkers, and be able to reproduce the discoveries in other environments around the world, a whole set of systematic rules started getting developed for how to perform and record such observations. And thus did the entire thing start resembling the "scientific process" we know today (form a theory; test it under unbiased conditions that can be reproduced by anyone; share your findings no matter what they are); and thus did such a process have less and less to do with religion over the centuries, with such "scientists" deliberately drubbing out such former mystical elements of their profession as alchemy so as to get the public to take them more seriously.

But was it in fact a mistake to drub out such metaphysical elements from what we now know as science? Did in fact the deep thinkers of humanity before the Renaissance have a different understanding of the way the world works, precisely by combining science with mysticism in the way they did back then, and did the deep thinkers of the Renaissance actually ruin something for humanity by separating the two topics? That's the question at the heart of John Crowley's The Solitudes, part 1 of a four-book cycle known officially as "Ægypt" (or "AEgypt" as I'll be calling it for the remainder of today's essay, to better accommodate those on web devices that cannot display special characters), a book which originally came out in 1987 but just last year received a major reworking and publishing. It is a frustrating book, I'll warn you right off the bat -- a dense, thick, scholarly novel, written in a style meant to sometimes deliberately confuse the reader, with a pacing that can drive you crazy at points and a storyline that is constantly flying at least a little bit right over your head. But it's also one of the most fascinating books I've read in years as well, a book that proposes ideas I've never heard another fantastical author even mention, ideas that literally take a lifetime of academic study to produce in the first place. It's a confusing book that elicits all kinds of shifting emotions in me that are hard to pin down; all of those things are of course going to end up affecting what I have to say about it today.

For example, let's start with just the surface-level plot itself; it is ostensibly the story of Pierce Moffett, a burned-out '60s history professor now muddling through life in the late '70s when our story takes place, who at the beginning of the book is just finishing up a disastrous few years in New York City, teaching at a hipster college in Brooklyn and living with a cunning and beautiful coke dealer in a concrete-lined condo in midtown Manhattan, going deeply into debt to support both the lifestyle the girlfriend brings and to help finance the illegal schemes she's constantly in the middle of cooking up. All of the elements just mentioned have recently blown up in Pierce's face, which is what finds him traveling by bus at the beginning of the novel to attend an interview at a precious private college in the northeast boonies; but right in the middle of the trip the bus breaks down, by complete coincidence in the picturesque upstate New York town of Faraway Hills, where by complete and utter coincidence an old '60s radical friend of his is now living and raising sheep. And thus does Pierce ditch the unmade interview and decide to relocate to Faraway Hills instead; and thus does he attend a series of precious small-town events like annual town-wide croquet matches and hot-air balloon races; and thus does Pierce ring up an ex-girlfriend who's now a literary agent and propose a new job for himself -- as the author of a series of Tolkien-style "Chariot of the Gods" type fantasy novels, so trendily popular in the late '70s, positing a world in which ancient races in mythical cities actually carved out the world we now know, just to fall into obscurity and to be forgotten in modern times.

Ah, but here's the first big complication -- that Pierce isn't kidding about any of the stuff being proposed, and in fact...