Modernist literature opened a place for an extraordinary exploration of the layers of hidden meaning that necessarily lie behind even the simplest narrative presentation. To penetrate into the phenomenological and mythological preconditions of experience through such writing was to approach a different metaphysical face of the ordinary realities that were so often and so typically described, where time, space and identity functioned in a very different and indeed more blissful and integrated way. That the enterprise seems to have rapidly peaked and then decayed, leaving behind a handful of masterpieces, now like broken monuments in a desolate terrain, seems in retrospect to have been inevitable. For one thing, aspects of the collective culture, of the Western and European culture, that made these works possible, because readable, needed to be kept relatively steady, like an arrangement of lenses that enables a long vista to come into focus. When the lenses move in response to a clamour of different forces, in which feedback from the deepest vision is only one easily drowned out voice, then new and possibly wonderful patterns of light might be produced, but the conditions for the penetrative vision are lost. And certainly there were many such forces entitled to exert influence on what they understood as cultural production. It may also be argued that this vision went as far as it could go, since the yoking together art with something like spiritual practice was the combining of two incompatible and mutually cancelling drives. The religion that could be assembled out of the metaphysical disjunctions and ecstatic insights of the high modernists could only ever be an incomplete one, entirely lacking the prophetic ruthlessness or the ability to recruit submissive followers that could have elevated their texts into scripture. Nonetheless, it is a kind of miracle that these texts have remained for us. We can still see through them, but only into their world, not into ours.