The sun has passed beneath the earth, but its rays penetrate rock and soil effortlessly, sleeting upward through the floor and into Tommaso’s body and spirit. Subtler forces also suffuse the spirit, should one only know how to receive them. The sun has grown so close to earth that even the people of the northern latitudes, like the Egyptians and Babylonians before them, suffer from a smokiness of the spirit, and abandon religion for idolatry. Can any task be more urgent than the teaching of truth, now that the future nears like the last messenger, descending the steps to one’s cell with the final warrant?
Sometimes he feels it coming. Spiritus will fill the world, like the roar of a lyceum so great that one cannot discern any words. Higher understanding will become impossible—Tommaso wishes he could resist this conclusion—and until the moment of the earth’s embrace by the anima mundi whose physical body is the sun, the spirits of Man will darken even as its intellect thrives. He tries to imagine this future, a world crackling with the astrological flux but obsessed with graven images, lost to God. So bright is the glow of its flux, he imagines he can dimly perceive it even now, burning through the veil of years in the uncandled donjons of his dreams.…
Amy sits on a stool behind long shelves of books, her laptop jacked into a wall phone by a cord so short that a corner of the machine dangles a centimeter above her lap. All the monitors in the catalogue room are in use, but Amy has managed to access the system by calling a number set up to allow scholars to consult library holdings from home. Now the electronic corridors of the university library have opened onto her small screen, and she roams between Author and Subject with a twitch of the finger resting on her trackball.
Paul left after dinner to have coffee with some friends, whom he admitted (curious at being excluded, Amy got it out of him) to having met through Jean-Claude. Middle Eastern students, apparently; Paul cited interesting perspectives. Amy requested that he ask about the theological imphcations of ruah in Islamic thought, but a furtiveness in his eye told her he would not. Jean-Claude would be there, she realizes, and know on whose behalf Paul is asking.
Amy is not happy with Paul, and stabs at the return key whenever words such as wind-spirit appear. Browsing the shelves “en ligne” allows her to quit the library entirely and try other ones; and after consulting the options that le programme gopher offers she switches into the Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, the Université de Lyon, and other signatories of the European Academic Research Network.
As she moves between libraries, however, she notices a change in the gopher’s hierarchies of response: each clique of her return key now prompts her laptop to emit a brief chime. Worried that this might attract an officious librarian, Amy pulls out her earphones and jacks them into the machine, diverting the sounds. To keep the phones out of her way, she fits them over her head.
Now she is in acoustical as well as visual contact with the electronic pathways (the online documentation actually refers to it as “un arbre”) of the EARN. Marsilio Ficino, she thinks, would be impressed.
She is moving through the accès structuri offered by the Ecole Normale Superieure, which does not seem more structured than any of the other library pathways, when she has the sudden sensation of being watched. She turns her bead quickly—the vulnerability of someone wearing headphones can be frightening once realized—but sees no one. Lifting the laptop to free the cord cutting across her chest, she leans forward to peer down the long row of shelves, half-hoping to see a stern librarian. But the sense that she is being regarded from behind persists.
Uneasily she returns to her screen, where a description of Campanella’s De Sensu Rerum et Magia was given in Latin, French, and (in places) Italian. Never ideal for reading, the small screen seems a jumble of antique words, like the medieval breviaries that Amy once had to study. She leans forward, and the words dissolve in a blur…
He is very far away, and appalled. Their contact is through a means unknown to her, and she finds its intimacy shocking, like the accident victim feeling the doctor’s probe click against bone. His mind is as alien as a whale’s, but for the moment he regards her clearly.
No words pass between them, but Amy gains the sense of tremendous will and pain—a wounded mammoth, pulling itself upright to glare at the wolves that have cornered it but do not dare approach. The lidless gaze, reflected down so many mirrors that the image swims in dimness, judges what it perceives, and judges hard; but as in all phantasmic reflection, it recognizes its object only by sharing its substance. Amy, a tiny figure at the limits of perception, is deplored but cannot be disowned. She is, they both understand, the heir to bis tradition, the product of all his labors.
Her hand, supporting the side of the machine, rests too hard against the phone jack, and the image vanishes like the reflection on a pond’s plashed surface. With a start Amy collects herself. Her reverie—about astrological magic, the unlikely last redoubt of the pneumatists—fades from mind with the return of her worldly cares, abandoned with the other appealing notions consigned by history to phantasy.