So with her the hero enters into a new stage of life, the last. And the goal would be to win a death: so to behave as to have a right to die.

He had put down neither dishrag nor polished glass. The house was all still around him, just for this hour, and for a long time he only stood; the water babbled softly from the faucet. It was so: anyway it made sense, which is the same thing, as far as some matters go, matters like this one. He had been young, and now was not; he had been given daughters into his care, his four-eyed anima, and the Crone to obey, to learn from. To learn at last both how to act and how to yield; how to be both agent and patient, and be changed himself by working to change another; how to grow old, how to die.

"Oh that is such bullshit,” Roo said to him, not unkindly, when on a later night Pierce (in purely abstract or mythopoeic terms, nothing personal) described this tripartite scheme to her. She pulled her flannel nightie on over her head, got into bed with her wool socks on. “You don't believe that stuff."

Bullshit it exactly was. Roo beside him was no avatar; she was of this earth; more than anyone he knew she belonged nowhere else, on no other plane. Which was strange, because she had felt herself kept out of this world for so long, and finally had to break in, and find a way to stay. Just as he had needed to be chastened and cajoled down or up into it, into here where everybody, everything, was. One world, where they could both only be: which she had had to break into, which he had tried so hard and so futilely to break out of.

* * * *

All the while, that world went on ceasing to be what it had been and becoming instead what it was to be. It had been winter back when Pierce first went to Europe, all those old states under snow; the worldwide spring that had seemed to sprout universally in his own twenty-sixth or Up Passage Year had by then already turned back and blasted by a cold wind from the east that then just went on blowing. Prague in Winter, said the New York Times Magazine one Sunday in 1979 after Pierce returned, having not however gone there, and the big pages showed the snow thick on the palaces and the statues he hadn't seen, the people in the cobbled streets bent into the wind and the weather. It was the deep cold in the bones that was meant too, the despair as things got only worse, the hunkering down to survive, to not waste energy; the resolve to wait and hope, or to forget hope; the temptation to eat the dog, and maybe the neighbor too. Unicuique suum in the jailer states of socialism.

Winter; spring. Barr had written, in the old book that in another winter Pierce was rereading in memoriam, that human culture turns centrally on the transformation of biological and physical facts into systems of opposition. Higher, lower; pure, impure; male, female; alive, dead; dark, light; youth, age; night, day; earth, heaven. In the economy of meaning these were the counters; the world is maintained as it is in the keeping apart of these pairs, and shocked into change by the combining or dissolving of them. There are certain scholars (J. Kaye, 1945, e.g.) who posit a principle in history that might be called the Law of Conservation of Meaning, by analogy with the principle in physics regarding the conservation of matter. There is, this principle holds, a certain fixed amount of meaning existing in a society's life; when it is subtracted or leaches out in one place, it merely outcrops in another; what religion loses, science or art or nationalism gains; when selfless acts of civil heroism are emptied of meaning by an age of cynicism or analytical criticism or social despair, then the lost meaning will be found in selfless acts of nihilism, or in the worship of the dandy or the hermit. And just as none is ever lost, so no new meaning is ever created; what seem to be brand-new vessels of meaning—in various ages alchemy, or psychiatry, or socialism—are only catchments for meaning that has evaporated elsewhere unnoticed.

And in 1989, the old ironbound empire rusted away, all in a few months; it had lost meaning even for those who most depended on its continuance, who couldn't bring themselves to call out the armies to defend it, and went to prison or exile or into the arms of their former victims with stunned expressions, you saw them every night on television, as one by one the sets were struck behind them, their cosmos rolled up as a scroll to reveal reality behind, shabby, scabby, blinking, like the prisoners let out from their dungeons in Fidelio, but right there where it had been all along. The elation of hearing human voices speaking, not in the accents of revolution or revenge but of plain humanity, civility, sense, as though you were truly face to face with them. Surely it was only because we here had not been paying attention that it seemed so sudden, whole regimes evanescing overnight and in the streets commonsensical smiling men and women young and old saying obvious things to cameras, surrounded by tens and hundreds of thousands of others.

So it happened: a new age really did begin, just as Pierce had once been tempted to promise in a book, no matter that he could actually have neither imagined nor foreseen it. And it began in Prague, there where it must, golden city, everyone's best city, city of the past and future become the present at last: just as if they had found and brought forth the stone of transformation, had known all along where it had been kept, as we all do. Václav Havel and his fellows met and spoke and argued and smoked like steam trains in their favorite spelunkas and then they held their forums in the Realistic Theater. Some theaters are more realistic than others. Or they met to make their plans and imagine an as yet nonexistent civil society in the basement of another theater, the Magic Lantern. The magic lantern was first described in 1646 by Athanasius Kircher, who succeeded Kepler as mathematician in chief to the Hapsburg court, and who decoded or thought he had decoded the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The magic lantern is pictured in his book Ars magna lucis et umbrae, the Great Art of Light and Dark, and in his illustration of the invention (p.768), the slide that is projected against a wall for some reason shows a soul suffering in Purgatory, raising his arms to ask for prayers, the prayers that will free him.

Light, darkness. In that autumn, in a Prague shop window, a poster appeared, showing a big number 89, and on it the word Autumn; arrows were drawn around it to show how it could be turned right around, and 89 would become 68, and on it when it was upended was the word Spring.

And then Mary and Vita were seven years old, and asleep in their small beds, and Pierce Moffett was preparing his midterms in Shakespeare and in world history, and Rosie Rasmussen called to give him a job.

10

Endings are hard. Everybody knows. It's probably because in our own beginningless endless Y-shaped lives things so rarely seem to end truly and properly—they end, but not with The End—that we love and need stories: rushing toward their sweet conclusions as though they rushed toward us, our eyes damp and breasts warm with guilty gratification, or grinning in delight and laughing at ourselves, and at them too, at the impossible endings; we read and we watch and we say in our hearts, This couldn't happen, and we also say, But here it is, happening.

When in his abbey cell he had set out on Kraft's typescript, Pierce thought it was going to turn out to be like a work out of the former age of the world, one of those vast ones like The Faerie Queene or The Canterbury Tales, which are unfinished but not therefore necessarily incomplete, their completion actually hovering perceptibly around them like a connect-the-dots puzzle half connected, or like the ghost limb that amputees feel, only not amputated but never grown. And he thought that maybe if Kraft could himself have ended it, it might have been in that way, so that what he had left undone would be clear.