John Crowley's Birthday

DECEMBER 1: NEGATIVE CAPABILITY celebrates the first day of December, 2014. It is John Crowley’s birthday. He was born this day in 1942. He is a writer of science fiction and fantasy as well as mainstream fiction. Perhaps his best-known novel is Little Big. Crowley is also a Documentary film-maker.

“The Universe is Time’s being,” he says. Negative Capability thinks about time and it’s passing as we begin a new month and into the celebrations of the season. We have gathered some of Crowley’s quotes as we ponder our “walkings-up” and greet the months unexpected surprising.

“There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That's what time is like.”
― John Crowley, Engine Summer

“But life is wakings-up, all unexpected, all surprising.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big