"I thought an epithet was a cussword."

"No no."

"Say them again?"

"Via. Veritas. Vita."

"Vita,” Roo said. “I might actually have a relative by that name."

"Vita,” Pierce said. “Life."

It's what I want, he'd said in the soda. He felt again, with huge, calm pride, himself saying it, as though it had been the first time in his life he ever had, and in the deepest way it was: the very first time. And he had felt his soul thereupon coming back to him, double.

"This isn't going to be easy,” Roo said, and that too she'd said before.

* * * *

It wasn't easy, though sometimes it was delight, the unspeakable delight that's in hymns and songs, the valley of love and delight. Sometimes it was atrociously hard, hard as a rock face he climbed toward a retreating summit, he'd had no idea. Once, with two babes asleep in his arms, a working wife asleep in the couch's crook, he watched on TV in pity and fellow feeling a climber, defeater of K2 or some such peak, who told how he was once benighted in the midst of scaling a sheer wall, and he had a little sling hammock he could string up on his pitons and sleep there in a crevice, like a bug on a window blind. And all night he hung there? Yes. It was cold and lonely, he said. Often he cried. Then in the dawn light he went on.

Stressed out, they said to one another, to the other parents they inevitably came to know, who marveled at their fortitude, two at once. Stressed out, as though they were metal members of some machine at the limits of its endurance, heating up with torque and tension, about to fail. Only now and then in the midst of uproars and disasters to be granted a blessing by the cold moon as he stepped outside his door, a charisma of blessing, a pause anyway for an eternal moment.

With so many things to do each day that must be done without fail—a circumstance he had never been in before, except for his own transmuting dreamworld imperatives and curses—Pierce found that not only could he not foresee real futures, he couldn't remember the present; he was, very likely had always been, absentminded to an almost pathological degree. He had lived mostly alone, and his disremembering had not come much to the attention of others, and so he always supposed that he could pay attention and keep his business straight if he really needed to; the problem, however, was apparently a part of the great flaw he had discovered on the streets of Rome: it was beyond the reach of his will, and though it could be mitigated, still he would forget his children at day care, leave their dinners in the grocery cart when he went to cash the check that he then found he had forgotten to bring. He would leave the children themselves in stores or public places, wander off, and then, when in horror he remembered them, be unable to find his way back—but that was only in dreams, all fathers have those.

He was proud when he seemed to be mastering the basic arithmetic of a life lived with schedules, a mortgage, twin children, and a couple of aged cars, but Roo was meanwhile doing higher algebra with the same quantities; he felt himself to be in the doghouse, often for reasons he couldn't entirely discern. I'm not a saint, he thought angrily, at the sink after a round of impatient reproaches, and all in a moment—glass and towel in his hand—he thought that though he surely wasn't a saint he was, or maybe could be, or had been, a hero, and if that was so, then he knew where and with whom he stood.

He laughed out loud. She turned, babe in arms, to shoot a baleful or warning look at him from the door, thinking maybe she was mocked, but he shook his head, no nothing, go go, doctor's waiting.

The third person of the trinity, last in the sequence or story. She who came after the Mother, who bore the hero, and the Beloved, whom he sought with pure heart and willing sword. (He'd just been reading about her in an old book of Barr's, Time's Body, where Barr in fact dismissed the triune figure as synthetic.) She was the Crone, the one who buries and bears away. Also appearing as the Ill-Favored Lady, who humiliates and challenges the hero and charges him with interpreting her commands and unriddling her harsh riddles, to labor under her sanctions until liberated. He makes no complaint, nothing he can't bear, but it's not just about bearing, suffering, patience: it's about the creation of a new self, one without grievance, longing, regret over the self's old hurts.

So with her the hero enters into a new stage of life, the last. And the goal would be to win a death: so to behave as to have a right to die.

He had put down neither dishrag nor polished glass. The house was all still around him, just for this hour, and for a long time he only stood; the water babbled softly from the faucet. It was so: anyway it made sense, which is the same thing, as far as some matters go, matters like this one. He had been young, and now was not; he had been given daughters into his care, his four-eyed anima, and the Crone to obey, to learn from. To learn at last both how to act and how to yield; how to be both agent and patient, and be changed himself by working to change another; how to grow old, how to die.

"Oh that is such bullshit,” Roo said to him, not unkindly, when on a later night Pierce (in purely abstract or mythopoeic terms, nothing personal) described this tripartite scheme to her. She pulled her flannel nightie on over her head, got into bed with her wool socks on. “You don't believe that stuff."

Bullshit it exactly was. Roo beside him was no avatar; she was of this earth; more than anyone he knew she belonged nowhere else, on no other plane. Which was strange, because she had felt herself kept out of this world for so long, and finally had to break in, and find a way to stay. Just as he had needed to be chastened and cajoled down or up into it, into here where everybody, everything, was. One world, where they could both only be: which she had had to break into, which he had tried so hard and so futilely to break out of.

* * * *

All the while, that world went on ceasing to be what it had been and becoming instead what it was to be. It had been winter back when Pierce first went to Europe, all those old states under snow; the worldwide spring that had seemed to sprout universally in his own twenty-sixth or Up Passage Year had by then already turned back and blasted by a cold wind from the east that then just went on blowing. Prague in Winter, said the New York Times Magazine one Sunday in 1979 after Pierce returned, having not however gone there, and the big pages showed the snow thick on the palaces and the statues he hadn't seen, the people in the cobbled streets bent into the wind and the weather. It was the deep cold in the bones that was meant too, the despair as things got only worse, the hunkering down to survive, to not waste energy; the resolve to wait and hope, or to forget hope; the temptation to eat the dog, and maybe the neighbor too. Unicuique suum in the jailer states of socialism.

Winter; spring. Barr had written, in the old book that in another winter Pierce was rereading in memoriam, that human culture turns centrally on the transformation of biological and physical facts into systems of opposition. Higher, lower; pure, impure; male, female; alive, dead; dark, light; youth, age; night, day; earth, heaven. In the economy of meaning these were the counters; the world is maintained as it is in the keeping apart of these pairs, and shocked into change by the combining or dissolving of them. There are certain scholars (J. Kaye, 1945, e.g.) who posit a principle in history that might be called the Law of Conservation of Meaning, by analogy with the principle in physics regarding the conservation of matter. There is, this principle holds, a certain fixed amount of meaning existing in a society's life; when it is subtracted or leaches out in one place, it merely outcrops in another; what religion loses, science or art or nationalism gains; when selfless acts of civil heroism are emptied of meaning by an age of cynicism or analytical criticism or social despair, then the lost meaning will be found in selfless acts of nihilism, or in the worship of the dandy or the hermit. And just as none is ever lost, so no new meaning is ever created; what seem to be brand-new vessels of meaning—in various ages alchemy, or psychiatry, or socialism—are only catchments for meaning that has evaporated elsewhere unnoticed.