Novelties & Souvenirs by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page B

stirring stick he had just raised out of his glass dripped whiskey drop by drop back into it, the older notion, the notion he had been unable to describe at all adequately to his editor, which he had long since dropped or thought he had dropped, stirred within him. Stirred mightily, though he tried to shut doors on it; stirred, rising, and came forth suddenly in all the panoply with which he had forgotten it had come to be dressed, its facets glittering, windows opening on vistas, great draperies billowing. It seemed to have grown old in itsseclusion but more potent, and fiercely reproachful of his neglect. Alarmed, he tried to shelter his tender new notion of Novelty and Security from its onrush, but even as he attempted this, the old notion seized upon the new, and as he watched helplessly, the two coupled in an utter ravishment and interlacement, made for each other, one thing now and more than twice as compelling as each had been before. “Jesus,” he said aloud; and then looked up, wondering if he had been heard. Victor and the woman were tête-àtête, talking urgently in undertones.
    IV
    “I know, I know,” he’d said, raising a hand to forestall his editor’s objection. “The Catholic Church is a joke. Especially the Catholic Church I grew up in…”
    “Sometimes a grim joke.”
    “And it’s been told a lot. The nuns, the weird rules, all that decayed scholastic guff. The prescriptions, and the proscriptions—especially the proscriptions, all so trivial when they weren’t hurtful or just ludicrous. But that’s not the way it’s perceived. For a kid, for me, the church organized the whole world—not morally, either, or not especially, but in its whole nature. Even if the kid isn’t particularly moved by thoughts of God and sin—I wasn’t—there’s still a lot of church left over, do you see? Because all the important things about the church were real things: objects, places, words, sights, smells, days. The liturgical calendar. The Eastern church must be even more so. For me, the church was mostly about the seasons: it kept them in order. The church was coextensive with the world.”
    “So the kid’s point of view against—”
    “No, no. What I would do, see, to get around this contradiction between the real church and this other church I seemed to experience physically and emotionally, is to reimagine the Catholic Church as another kind of church altogether, a very subtle and wise church, that understood all these feelings; a church that was really—secretly— about these things in fact, and not what it seemed to be about; and then pretend, in the book, that the church I grew up in was that church.”
    “You’re going to invent a whole new religion?”
    “Well, not exactly. It would just be a matter of shifting emphasis, somehow, turning a thing a hundred and eighty degrees…”
    “Well, how? Do you mean ‘books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,’ that kind of thing? Pantheism?”
    “No. No. The opposite. In that kind of religion the trees and the sky and the weather stand for God or some kind of supernatural unity. In my religion, God and all the rituals and sacraments would stand for the real world. The religion would be a means of perceiving the real world in a sacramental way. A Gnostic ascension. A secret at the heart of it. And the secret is—everything. Common reality. The day outside the church window.”
    “Hm.”
    “That’s what it would really have been about from the beginning. And only seemed to be about these divine personages, and stuff, and these rules.”
    She nodded slowly in a way that showed she followed him but frankly saw no novel. He went on, wanting at least to say it all before he no longer saw it with this clarity. “The priests and nuns would know this was the case, the wisest of them, and would guide the worshipers—the ones they thought could grasp it—to see through the paradox, to see that it is a paradox: that only bybelieving, wholly and