John Crowley's Aegypt (retitled The Solitudes in later printings, as Aegypt is the title of the complete tetrology) is an odd book. I found the whole thing compelling in almost the exact same way that I found Doris Lessing's Shikasta compelling: While I find the framing mythology "not very interesting," the description of "how life is" rings amazingly true. For Lessing, Shikasta was the result of discovering Sufism, an interest that remained with her for the rest of her life. I'm not sure what Crowley's orientation really is, but his interviews give the impression of a non religious person.
Anyway, One of Crowley's themes in the first book is the nature of history:
"Once upon a time, when he was a kid, when he first decided or understood that he would be a historian, he had had the vague idea that he would do just that, that historians did that, kept shops, dispensed history somehow to those who needed it."
Resonates with Barbara Tuchman's description of being a historian without being a professor at a University. History outside the academe....
"Of course a vivid imagination was a help, and Pierce had that; as a student he had been able to browse happily amid statistical breakdowns of transalpine shipping in the sixteenth century or analyses of Viking boat-building techniques, because what he always saw proceeding in his mind was a drama, real men and women at real tasks, linked in the web of history of course but not conscious of that, men and women doing and saying, dreaming and playing, at once compelled absolutely to do what they had done (they were all dead, after all) and at the same time free in their moment, free to hope and regret and blame themselves for failure and thank God for success."
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