Re-reading John Crowley’s novel Aegypt, now published on Kindle under the author’s original title, The Solitudes, some 30 years later has been a revelatory experience – not only for its insight into the foibles and follies, the naive earnestness and yearning of a generation, but also for the wealth of vocabulary and the sheer profusion of references I failed to notice or understand the first time. Today a shard of a sentence – “… back to the door into dream they issued from, the Gate of Horn” – sent me first to my own bookcase to stare in wonder at a used paperback I’d picked up but hadn’t read yet, another novel in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago series, Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn, and then to Wikipedia. And there I learned of the origins of the gates of horn and ivory, a play on words in Greek, a literary image to distinguish true dreams from false. The image first appeared in the Odyssey, according to Wikipedia, but it has surfaced in literature over and over again.

The list of English references includes the likes of Edmund Spenser and Alexander Pope and T.S. Eliot, E.R. Eddison and H.P. Lovecraft, the Holdstock book on my shelf but also books by Neil Gaiman (well, of course) and Ursula LeGuin (I shouldn’t be surprised) that I own. The effect of reading the article was like a series of tumblers clicking into place and opening dozens of doors with just one half turn of a key.

I am both awed and humbled. Humbled because I realize that the more I read (and re-read), the less I know. If I lived another 30 years I don’t know that my mind could hold all those references and make those connections. And awed because within the span of my life, computers help make connections that once would have taken a researcher weeks, months, years to assemble, as easy as typing a phrase into Google search.