good.
On a bitter cold solstice night, too cold to go abroad, Pierce with the beginnings of a flu sat wrapped in a blanket (the heat in his aged building had failed) and turned the pages of Barr's book, Time's Body, which he had brought home from the far-off Brooklyn Public, and read, fever beginning to crackle in his ears:
Plutarch records that in the early years of the reign of Tiberius the pilot of a ship rounding the Greek archipelago passed a certain island at dawn on the solstice day and heard his name called from shore: “Thamus! When you come near the Palodes, tell them that the great god Pan is dead!” He thought at first to refuse, being afraid, but when he came opposite the Palodes, he called out the words as he had heard them: “Pan is dead! The great god Pan is dead!” And then there arose from the island a lamenting and wailing, not of one voice but of many mingled, as though the earth itself mourned.
A shiver ran up Pierce's spine beneath the blanket. He had read this story before, and had shivered then too.
To say [Barr continued] that the great god Pan died in the early years of the reign of Tiberius is in a sense to say nothing at all, or a great deal too much. We know what god was born on a solstice day in those years; we know his after-history; we know in what sense Pan died at the approach of that new god. The shiver of fear or delight we feel still at the story is the shiver Augustine felt at the same story: a world-age is passing, and a man, a pagan, is hearing it pass, and does not know it.
But we know too—and Plutarch knew—that on those islands of the Greek archipelago the cult of the year-god, the god of many names—Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz, Pan—was historically practiced. In all likelihood his murder and resurrection were still celebrated in imperial times, and the ecstatic female cults who each year tore in pieces and then mourned their god in wailing and shrieking and rending their garments, were still extant. Had Plutarch's pilot Thamus blundered into a ritual mourning for Tammuz? What is certain is that if he had passed the same islands the previous year, or any year for the previous five or ten centuries, he would have heard of the same climactic event, and been shuddered by the same wailing; for the year, as those Greeks believed, could not have gone round without it.
Pierce was beginning to feel very strange. A sense like déjà vu had overtaken him; a sense that some mental process was disengaging within him, and re-engaging in a different, but not a new, way.
And yet what have we learned, having learned this? Have we disposed of Plutarch's story, and the awful prophecy it contains, the anecdote of a world's passing? I don't believe it.
Suppose a man finds a five-dollar bill on a certain street corner at a certain time of day.
(Definitely, definitely he had read this before, and yet could not remember how it came out.)
Reason and the laws of probability will tell him that this street corner which has produced for him a chance treasure, is now neither more likely nor less likely than any other street corner in the city to produce another one. It remains a street corner, like others. And yet which of us, on passing our lucky corner at our lucky time of day, would not take a quick look around? A conjunction took place there of ourselves, our desires, and the world; it has acquired meaning; if it produces no more for us, are we not tempted to think we have only used up a magic which it once truly had? We cannot help imposing our desires on the world—even though the world remains impervious to them, and keeps to laws that are not the laws our natures suppose it ought to have.
But history is made by man. Old Vico said that man can only fully understand what he has made; the corollary to that is, that what man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand. So if we look at history and find in it huge stories,
On a bitter cold solstice night, too cold to go abroad, Pierce with the beginnings of a flu sat wrapped in a blanket (the heat in his aged building had failed) and turned the pages of Barr's book, Time's Body, which he had brought home from the far-off Brooklyn Public, and read, fever beginning to crackle in his ears:
Plutarch records that in the early years of the reign of Tiberius the pilot of a ship rounding the Greek archipelago passed a certain island at dawn on the solstice day and heard his name called from shore: “Thamus! When you come near the Palodes, tell them that the great god Pan is dead!” He thought at first to refuse, being afraid, but when he came opposite the Palodes, he called out the words as he had heard them: “Pan is dead! The great god Pan is dead!” And then there arose from the island a lamenting and wailing, not of one voice but of many mingled, as though the earth itself mourned.
A shiver ran up Pierce's spine beneath the blanket. He had read this story before, and had shivered then too.
To say [Barr continued] that the great god Pan died in the early years of the reign of Tiberius is in a sense to say nothing at all, or a great deal too much. We know what god was born on a solstice day in those years; we know his after-history; we know in what sense Pan died at the approach of that new god. The shiver of fear or delight we feel still at the story is the shiver Augustine felt at the same story: a world-age is passing, and a man, a pagan, is hearing it pass, and does not know it.
But we know too—and Plutarch knew—that on those islands of the Greek archipelago the cult of the year-god, the god of many names—Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz, Pan—was historically practiced. In all likelihood his murder and resurrection were still celebrated in imperial times, and the ecstatic female cults who each year tore in pieces and then mourned their god in wailing and shrieking and rending their garments, were still extant. Had Plutarch's pilot Thamus blundered into a ritual mourning for Tammuz? What is certain is that if he had passed the same islands the previous year, or any year for the previous five or ten centuries, he would have heard of the same climactic event, and been shuddered by the same wailing; for the year, as those Greeks believed, could not have gone round without it.
Pierce was beginning to feel very strange. A sense like déjà vu had overtaken him; a sense that some mental process was disengaging within him, and re-engaging in a different, but not a new, way.
And yet what have we learned, having learned this? Have we disposed of Plutarch's story, and the awful prophecy it contains, the anecdote of a world's passing? I don't believe it.
Suppose a man finds a five-dollar bill on a certain street corner at a certain time of day.
(Definitely, definitely he had read this before, and yet could not remember how it came out.)
Reason and the laws of probability will tell him that this street corner which has produced for him a chance treasure, is now neither more likely nor less likely than any other street corner in the city to produce another one. It remains a street corner, like others. And yet which of us, on passing our lucky corner at our lucky time of day, would not take a quick look around? A conjunction took place there of ourselves, our desires, and the world; it has acquired meaning; if it produces no more for us, are we not tempted to think we have only used up a magic which it once truly had? We cannot help imposing our desires on the world—even though the world remains impervious to them, and keeps to laws that are not the laws our natures suppose it ought to have.
But history is made by man. Old Vico said that man can only fully understand what he has made; the corollary to that is, that what man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand. So if we look at history and find in it huge stories,
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