Does the world have a secret history, encoded in myth and legend, reflected in the very windings of our brains? Born with the talents to be a real historian, but clinging to a minor teaching job, Pierce Moffett watches the great Parade of the ’60s go by him, and wonders. He’s still wondering years later when, jilted and newly jobless, he gets off a bus by chance in the Faraway Hills and steps unawares into a story that has been awaiting him there.
Does the world have a plot? It’s what Rosie Rasmussen wants to know, too. Will her life have the fearful symmetry of the lives led inside the books she reads? Rosie, newly returned to her childhood environs in the Faraways, is reading the historical romances of dead Fellowes Kraft one after another to see her through the hard realities of a divorce. There is another history in Kraft’s vivid novels: there are angels and Elizabethan magicians and the boy Shakespeare; once upon a time these tales entranced Pierce Moffett too, and teased him with the traces of a very large story indeed…
Pierce is on the track of a history he can’t quite believe in; Rosie is losing her place in her own story, forgetting why people love one another. They are two seekers, marked by loss, about to share a discover in Fellowes Kraft’s old house in the Faraway Hills. There is more than one history of the world.
This is the story of how Pierce Moffet’s life suddenly turns upside down and he winds up landing in a tiny village somewhere in New York state, where he slowly rebuilds his life. In that process of finding a new path, falling in love, dealing with his family history and so on, he begins to dive into a question an old professor of his planted in his mind: is there more than one history of the world? Can the metaphysical be completely ripped apart from the scientific? Should it? After all, it’s only a relatively recent trend to separate science and spirituality: the thing about magic is that when we start understanding it, it becomes science. Pierce becomes convinced that a country called Aegypt is the answer, that it exists just outside of our perceptions, perhaps at a different time than the historical Egypt; it is the land where magic and occult knowledge comes from and Pierce wants to write its history.
Avid readers of classical literature and writers will find his work very rich, multilayered and interesting, though maybe not entertaining.
This book will appeal to readers who are fascinated with history, philosophy, the occult and the possibility that the generally-accepted concept of reality is not all there is. This is a book about how our perception affects our understanding of the world, about how Western mysticism and the related beliefs and superstitions affect our reality through our worldview.
What Has Been Read Cannot Be Unread 