"When he was very small he had been told the story of the man who was caught in a rainstorm and sought shelter in an old barn. He fell asleep in the hayloft, and when he woke it was deep midnight. He saw, walking on the rafters of the barn, a clowder of cats; they would walk the rafters and meet, and seem to pass a message. Then two cats met on a rafter very near where he lay hidden, and he heard one say to the other: "Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead." And so they parted. When the man got home that day, he told his wife what had happened, and what he had heard the cats say: "Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead." And on hearing that, their old family cat, dozing by the fire, leaped up with a shriek and cried out: "Then I'm to be king of the cats!" And it shot up the chimney, and was never seen again.
That story had made him shiver and wonder, and ponder for days; not the story that had been told, but the secret story within it that had not been told: the story about the cats, the secret story that had been going on all along and that no one knew but they."
Crowley has a manner of interrupting the thoughts of his characters as if he is literally following their thoughts. Also, probably related, he does not fear to repeat words and sentences. Cool technique.
The premise, or one of its premises; how outside our thoughts, our dreams, the layers of our myths, lies the cold, real world. A world bereft of dreams and thoughts. How perhaps these two worlds, ours and the physical world, are not so different after all. The universe: a safe with a combination lock, the combination hidden inside itself. But aren't we part of the universe's dust. Isn't the combination inside us, inside our stories, and the stories hiding underneath our stories?
"Renaissance ... all their scholarship, all their learning, was bent towards re-creating as best they could the past in the present, because the past had necessarily been better, wiser, less decayed than the present. And so the older an old manuscript was, the older the knowledge it contained, the better it must turn out to be, once it had been cleansed of the accretions and errors of later times: the closer to the old Golden Age."
from the introduction: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." [LP Hartley's novel "The Go-Between"]
"'It seems ... that what grants meaning in folktales and legendary narratives ... is not logical development so much as thematic repetition, the same idea or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances. ... A hero sets out ... to find a atreasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches is the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden, repeated in different forms, like a set of nesting boxes - each of them however just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told. ... Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions, or inherent in a story's premises - logical completion as a vehicle of meaning - all that is later, not necessarily later in time, but belonging to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works, like The Fairy Queene, which set up for themselves a titanic plot, an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it: never need to finish it, because they are at heart works of the older kind, and the pattern has already arisne satisfyingly within them, the flavor is already there.'"
