RIP John Crowley

I discovered the novels of John Crowley, starting with  Ægypt, probably 30 years ago. Once I read Little, Big, it became my all-time favorite novel. I have given copies to many people, friends and family, over the years. To my knowledge none have read it. The Crowley portal doesn't admit everyone. Those who enter find a space between the known and the imagined, where much more is possible. We don't want to leave, to return to a more limited more mundane world, after what we've seen, and sensed, and felt. 

John Drinkwater, builder of a model house in the country with five facades, five front doors, and familiar interiors along with places that didn't properly, or sometimes, connect, powered by an orrery (a brass model of our solar system) in the attic, made his living publishing animal stories marketed to children. He explained to a grandson that writing them was easy - he just copied conversations he overheard among the small creatures - the mice, the little birds, the fish.

His wife, Violet Bramble, was a scion of Theosophists. What she believed he didn't need to. She had an unusual ancient Tarot deck she consulted the way you might read a newspaper. Their daughter Daily Alice married a man who walked to the house: Stormy Barnable. Like his father-in-law he didn't have any interest in - nor hostility toward - the women's way of understanding the world.

One of their sons photographed fairies who were attracted by a pair of small granddaughters. His name was Auberon (Oberon: King of the Fairies, Titania his Queen).

Little, Big is full of joys and sorrows, wonderfully apt names and a multitude of small brilliant observations. One could read it a hundred times and find new connections, new notions, surprises and satisfactions. Like the greatest fictions of invented places, it has unerring internal consistency, integrity. We are the playthings of time and space, and other worlds interweave with the one we’re accustomed to, in ways we might glimpse or may never be capable of acknowledging. If you find “the world is too much with us,” as William Wordsworth’s poem says, take respite. Dig into this Tale, reimagine life.

The third volume of Crowley's trilogy (Ægypt; Love and Sleep; Dæmonomania), set in Blackbury Jambs in the Faraway Hills, begins with the arrival of Pierce Moffett: "The Houses of the Zodiac are not the Signs... Suppose, at your birth, a line were to be drawn across the eastern sky right at the horizon out beyond where you lie. Then up the sky were drawn eleven more lines, equally spaced, going up over your head, down around behind you, and into the nether sky below, coming back around to where you started, dividing the blue ball of the heavens around you (pretend it's really a ball) into twelve equal orange-slice sections, with your little self at the center. Then suppose the sections are numbered, starting with the one just at the eastern horizon. That section's the first House, Vita, the House of Life; the eighth House, Mars, House of Death, is over your head and to the west. Interesting? Now look out the windows of these houses - they are nothing but windows - and see what stars are caught in each just at the moment you appear bare and wailing on the earth. Say for instance Saturn, so heavy and cold, is out there in your first house, the House of Life; and say the sign Capricorn or part of it is just behind him, which is one of his favorite signs, and there you are, a lot of Saturn in your horoscope, in a House where it counts too. and though Val [the astrologer] would never say that this street of houses on which you find yourself will make you what you are, what you do make of yourself has got to be made here."

Thank you, John Crowley, for seeing far and recording it to share with us! I hope your next iteration is wonderful - you've surely earned it!