I’m back from the beach, and not a moment too soon to judge by the Noachian blanket that’s fallen over the eastern seaboard. Among the more sober diversions of the week away, we all got a fair amount of reading done. I made use of the first days to tackle John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, which apart from being a longtime resident of the ever-growing list of “books I really ought to get round to eventually” had the virtue of being slender enough to tuck comfortably between a frisbee (red with a little alien-head proclaiming “Take Me To Your Economist Reader!”—swag from that recent guest-blogging stint) and a beach-towel without crowding out a few beers.

I won’t say I disliked it, but I find myself agreeing, in tenor if not quite in vehemence, with John Gardner’s take on most such metafictional gimmickry. Like all too much contemporary art, it has the feel of a prank or parlor trick. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you: I enjoy a good parlor trick as much as the next fellow. Still, when the climactic flourish is an exposure of how the trick was pulled off, there’s only so many variants you can observe with interest. Sooner or later, exploding tropes becomes just one more trope, and Ouroboros swallowing its own tail begins to look suspiciously like a reflection of the author fellating himself.

So perhaps it’s little surprise that one of my favorite stories in the bunch was one of the most conventional: “Night-Sea Journey.” I’ll try not to spoil the twist, but the tale consists largely of a highly unlikely narrator’s musings on theology (of a sort) and the meaning of life. What struck me was that the theology elaborated here had a structure more interesting and satisfying than any existing one I’m acquainted with.

We all—and I address, with apologies if this is terribly Eurocentric, my imagined modal reader here—are most familiar with a certain kind of linear monotheistic cosmology: Deity, eternal and inscrutable, wishes the world into being, hijinks ensue, until some great final judgment—perhaps with looping twin codas of bliss and torment. The explanatory component of this sort of story, such as it is, consists of pure ignotum per ingotius, and while the proponents of such stories are fond of describing this rapturously as “mystery,” it’s not a very good mystery, is it? Just a gesture at a black box, a brute fact, on the other side of Kierkegaard’s chasm. Like getting to the last page of the murder mystery and discovering that the butler did it just because he’s crazy.

More or less satisfying, depending on your mood, are the cosmologies that trace nested loop-de-loops. At the microlevel, we’re born, we die, we reincarnate. At then macolevel, it’s big bang, big crunch, big bang again. Each life and each universe is Bloom slipping between Molly’s sheets: “always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.”

So much for lines and loops. But the möbius strip structure I just dismissed as a gimmick in fiction, well, that might well be sublime in a cosmology.

Imagine a hyper-advanced civilization facing the heat death of its universe. Unable to escape themselves, they settle for the shadow of immortality enjoyed by all proud parents: They craft a litter of new pocket universes to bloom outward at the death of their own, physical constants crafted with lapidary precision to produce, if not quite themselves again, then beings very much like them, who might have understood their own thoughts and desires and frustrations. And to complete the symmetry, they doom the new universe to the same ultimate fate as their own, spurring their distant descendants—they hope at least one foetal cosmos will yield a race up to the task—to the same desperate act of creation. And then the twist on the strip: None of these fecund universes is first or last, but each (time being only a house rule of each creation) one of its own countless giga-great-grandchildren.

In this story, the tedious mystery of transcendence, of the unknowably distant, turns into the delightful mystery of immanent fractal recursion, of paradox that won’t be comprehended even though—perhaps because—it’s fully apprehended. That would be, if not quite a religious doctrine I could believe, then at least one I might like to.