"He hadn't lost his vocation, he had only grown up; he had desired to grow up and there would have been no way to prevent it even if he hadn't desired it. History, that undiscovered country he had seen far off - yes, it had turned out to be only ordinary, different from his own not in kind but only in tedious details of geography and local custom, lists of which he had had to commit to memory: he knew, for he had explored that country, of course, just as he had wanted to; he lived there every working day.
His progress had always been outward, away from stories, away from marvels; it had been a journey, as he saw it, away from childhood, the same journey outward that the human race had long been on, and which he, Pierce Moffett, was only recapitulating in his own ontogeny, joining up with it, at his maturity, at the place it had by then reached.
....He had something fearfully wrong.
....Did the world have a plot? Had it only seemed to lack one because he had forgotten his own?"
"If he thought there was no story in history, just one damned thing after another, Barr had said, it was only because he had ceased to recognize himself."
Aegypt
John Crowley
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