This consists of four stories--"quarters," Sedgwick calls them--from four different eras. Each is a compelling, haunting meditation on human nature. Each has horror undertones, confronts suffering and misery. Each is distinct in style, tone, setting, and action. Each involves philosophical musings about the meaning of spirals in the way of Jungian archetypes (universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct; Wikipedia).
There is the girl who watches as her prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribe is ambushed and hunted by another tribe, hoping she can find some kind of symbolic cave magic to help them survive: "Whispers in the Dark."
There is the girl whose mother, the village's cunning woman (herbal healer), has just died and who finds herself accused by the new priest of witchcraft: "The Witch in the Water."
There is the young psychologist hoping to help transform insane asylums into true houses of healing who becomes obsessed with a patient haunted by Lovecraftian terrors: "The Easiest Room in Hell."
And there is the voyager operating as a sentinel on a century-long space flight to hopefully colonize a New Earth, waking every 10 years to monitor the life-support systems of the suspended pioneers, confronted with mysterious deaths, isolation madness, and possible time paradoxes: "The Song of Destiny."
I was drawn into and moved by all of them. I would have liked to have been a bit more moved by the connecting framework of the spiral, as I connected with it philosophically but not as emotionally as the characters. Nevertheless, I remain haunted by the imagery and associations. A quietly powerful book.
She is the one who goes on,
when others remain behind.
The one who walks into darkness,
when others cling to the light.
She is the one who will step alone into the cave,
with fire in her hand,
and with fire in her head.
-----
Sliding satisfied into his thoughts were memories of his work; his calling. Images of unrepentant sinners; some faces he could remember, others he could not, but that mattered little. What mattered were the numbers of those who he had brought to some kind of redemption at the end of a good length of twisted English rope.
-----
It is never a good idea to feel too much for your patients. If you followed every madman down his dark flight to death you would soon be destroyed.
-----
I have spent my life trying to fill my mind. I have spent it trying to fill the thing, and yet the more I learn, the more I realize still remains to be understood. . . . So I have tried to open my mind further, and to fill it further, and yet the process appears to be an infinite one, on and on, forever.
-----
It was, many people felt, in man's nature to explore, to expand, in short: to live. The desire to survive and prosper, it was argued, is the very meaning of life itself. It must go on, forever, without limit, and to deny that would be to deny life.
-----
You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever.
-----
It is enough to know that not to know is enough.
It is enough not to know.