The Ten Thousand Doors of January(16)

i) that doors are portals between one world and another, which exist only in places of particular and indefinable resonance (what physical-philosophers call “weak coupling” between two universes). While human construction—frames, arches, curtains, et cetera—may surround a door, the natural phenomenon itself preexists its decoration in every case. It also seems to be the case that these portals are, by some quirk of physics or of humanity, damnably difficult to find.

ii) that such portals generate a certain degree of leakage. Matter and energy flow freely through them, and so too do people, foreign species, music, inventions, ideas—all the sorts of things that generate mythologies, in short. If one follows the stories, one will nearly always find a doorway buried at their roots.1

iii) that this leakage and resultant storytelling have been and remain crucial to humanity’s cultural, intellectual, political, and economic development, in every world. In biology, it is the interplay between random genetic mutation and environmental change that results in evolution. Doors introduce change. And from change come all things: revolution, resistance, empowerment, upheaval, invention, collapse, reformation—all the most vital components of human history, in short.

iv) that doors are, like most precious things, fragile. Once closed, they cannot be reopened by any means this author has discovered.

The evidence supporting theories i–iv has been divided into eighteen subcategories, presented below as


At least, that is the book I intended to write, when I was young and arrogant.

I dreamed of insurmountable evidence, scholarly respectability, publications, and lectures. I have boxes and boxes of neatly indexed note cards, each describing some small brick in a vast wall of research: an Indonesian story about a golden tree whose boughs made a shimmering archway; a reference in a Gaelic hymn to the angels who fly through heaven’s gate; the memory of a carven wood doorway in Mali, sand-weathered and blackened by centuries of secrets.

This is not the book I have written.

Instead, I’ve written something strange, deeply personal, highly subjective. I am a scientist studying his own soul, a snake swallowing its own tail.

But even if I could tame my own impulses and write something scholarly, I fear it would not matter, because who would take seriously my claims without solid proof? Proof that I cannot provide, because it disappears almost as soon as I discover it. There is a fog creeping along at my heels, swallowing my footsteps and erasing my evidence. Closing the doors.

The book you have in your hands is not, therefore, a respectable work of scholarship. It has not benefited from editorial oversight and contains little verifiable fact. It is just a story.

I have written it anyway, for two reasons:

First, because what is written is what is true. Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy. Even my own writings—so damnably powerless—may have just enough power to reach the right person and to tell the right truth, and change the nature of things.

Second, my long years of research have taught me that all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth.

It is my hope that this story is your thread, and at the end of it you find a door.





Chapter One


An Introduction to Miss Adelaide Lee Larson and Her Formative Explorations


Her lineage and early life—The opening of a door—The closing of a door—The changes wrought on the soul of a young girl


Miss Adelaide Lee Larson was born in 1866.

The world had just begun to whisper the word modern to itself, along with words like order and unfettered free trade. Railroads and telegraph lines snaked across frontiers like long lines of stitches; empires nibbled at the coasts of Africa; cotton mills churned and hummed like open mouths, swallowing bent-backed workers and exhaling fibrous steam.

But other, older words—like chaos and revolution—still lingered in the margins. The European rebellions of 1848 hung like gun smoke in the air; the sepoys of India could still taste mutiny on their tongues; women whispered and conspired, sewing banners and authoring pamphlets; freedmen stood unshackled in the bloodied light of their new nation. All the symptoms, in short, of a world still riddled with open doors.

But the Larson family was, on the whole, utterly disinterested in the goings-on of the wider world, and the wider world politely returned their sentiments. Their farm was tucked in a green wrinkle of land in the middle of the country, precisely where the nation’s heart would be if it were a living body, which troops on both sides of the Civil War had overlooked as they marched past. The family grew enough corn to feed themselves and their four milk cows, harvested enough hemp to sell downriver to the southern cotton balers, and salted enough venison to keep their teeth from rattling loose in the winter. Their interests extended little farther than the borders of the seven acres, and their political views never grew more complex than Mama Larson’s dictum that “them that has, gets.” When in 1860 young Lee Larson suffered a fit of patriotism and scurried into town to cast his vote for John Bell, who promptly lost not only to Mr. Lincoln but also to Douglas and Breckenridge, it simply confirmed their clannish suspicion that politicking was a ruse designed to distract hardworking folk from their business.

None of this marked the Larsons apart from any of their neighbors. It seems unlikely that any biographer or chronicler or even a local newspaperman has ever written their names in print before now. The interviews conducted for this study were stilted, suspicious affairs, akin to interrogating starlings or white-tailed deer.