Will Stenberg
John Crowley has died. If he had only written “Little, Big” he would have been one of the greatest writers in modern history. But he wrote a lot more. It’s hard to say why he was never elevated to the ranks of Borges or Pynchon or whomever, despite advocates like Harold Bloom yelling from the rooftops for his inclusion in the canon. Perhaps because of a publishing industry that relegated his works to the “fantasy” genre, despite them having virtually no connection with the post-Tolkien flood. They just happened to deal with a world that had magic creeping around its edges. In other words, this one. One page of Crowley is worth a thousand books from lesser authors; one chews on his sentences, feeling their texture; one weighs them on a spiritual baker’s scale only to find that, by God, they really are that perfect, that finely honed. Apparently he struggled to publish in later years. Time is the revelator. His works will survive because they are suffused with truth and beauty. Same thing, if Keats was right. Crowley probably thought so. In my view, there was no one better. Farewell, maestro. “While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Dr. Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: 'There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.' This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said 'Years'.” - John Crowley, “Little, Big”
