III. THE CRACK ON THE SURFACE OF REALITY
 
A CENTURY AND THREE quarters before our story begins, during the first, tentative stages of the Renaissance, when one Western mind-world was dying and another was in the throes of being born, the wisest men and women in Europe could observe a hairline crack, as it were, on the surface of reality. This kind of crack is more likely to form in the life of an individual than in the life of an entire culture. When a woman or a man undergoes a deep spiritual transformation, there are certain critical points along the way when what is partial needs to be shattered in order to become what is whole. At such points, the hidden powers and illnesses of the soul may be unleashed, giving rise to bizarre phenomena in which darkness and light are interchangeable and in which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish miracle from madness. That is what was happening in Europe during the early years of the Renaissance, and why the wise women and men of the time were so deeply concerned. Travelers had begun to sight giants in the mountains and forests. Wish-bestowing rings were appearing suddenly on the dusty back shelves of jewelry shops in small provincial towns. Farmers’ sons would plant a bean, and it was a toss-up whether an ordinary beanstalk would grow in its place or a beanstalk whose top punctured the clouds. Fishermen would reel in their catch, and sometimes a fish would silently thrash about in its death-agony as fish had always done, and sometimes it would stand up on its tail and, in a suave baritone that might have been coming from the mouth of a character in a Noël Coward play, offer the fisherman three gifts in return for its freedom. Hunters would be riding in pursuit of a deer or a fox, and suddenly the deer or fox would halt, wheel about, and address them in perfect High German or in a French so elegant that a committee of scholars from the Sorbonne would not only have approved but applauded. Articulate animals were, in fact, popping up all over the place: talking deer, foxes, frogs, flounders, hares, hedgehogs, salamanders, goats, geese, mice, rats, cats, dogs of every breed, nightingales, sparrows, owls, hawks, wolves, horses (whole horses or, on one occasion, just a severed head), donkeys, lions, bears, and assorted other large, hitherto-silent carnivores. Magic was afoot everywhere. Things were getting out of hand.
      
Now, it is perfectly fine for a deer or fox, in a dream or on one of the other borderlands of reality, to give us a well-timed piece of advice once in a great while. But when what happens inside the soul spills up into our outer, physical world, life can become extremely difficult, and sometimes extremely frightening. And when Once upon a time erupts across an entire culture, things can get very dicey indeed. In such a crisis, we need all the wisdom we can find.
      
That is why, after the crack on the surface of reality had been noticed and observed for several years, a delegation of wise men and women went to the King of France and the King of Germany to request—to insist—that their respective governments be decentralized, at least until after this crisis had passed. Wielding political power, they said (quoting the Tao Te Ching, which had been brought back to Europe by Marco Polo a hundred years earlier, at the beginning of the fourteenth century), incurs grave responsibilities and, as with spiritual power, many a good man has wandered off the path and become deeply entangled in the brambles of personal ambition or shortsighted ideals. The truth about power, they said, is that the more you are given, the deeper is your obligation to let go of it. The wise ruler does his job and then steps back: he understands that the universe is forever out of control and that trying to dominate events goes against the current of the Tao; he lets things go their own way and resides at the center of the circle, they said.
      
The King of France and the King of Germany were reasonable men. Whether they agreed to the decentralization because they were reasonable men or because the uncanniness of events had frightened them to the tips of their royal toes, no one knew. The fact is, however, that they did agree, and in the aftermath of their decision, several dozen independent kingdoms sprang up throughout Germany and France. This was still the situation 175 years later, at the end of the sixteenth century, when our story takes place. (Two subsequent delegations were dispatched, whose job was to nourish the growth of spiritual sanity in Europe and to make a report on the frequency of Unusual Phenomena. The second delegation, which included Rabelais, Erasmus, and the young Louise Labé‚ met in 1536, as the time of the giants was drawing to an end; and the final delegation, the one that abolished independent kingdoms in France, met in 1606, just after the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, when the crack on the surface of reality had painfully but mercifully closed.)