with its famous refrain: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” The stories that comprise this novella—all con-nected, distally or centrally, to a mystical, mythical (mythical?) used-book store called Lost Pages—embody that oxymoronic, Zen nugget of self-observation by Dylan. Pretence and pretentiousness, self-consciousness and self-importance, “seriousness,” and “maturity,” judgmentalism and dogmatism—these so-called “adult” qualities are not the true mark of wisdom or experience in the deep ways of the world. They are instead too often the overreaching, desperately grasping strategies of adolescents and young adults who have forgotten the clear knowledge of pure childhood, but also have not yet attained the hard-won, never-guaranteed insights of older years, which in many ways resemble that selfsame childlike cosmic certitude. In The Door to Lost Pages, Claude Lalumière is intent on showing us that access to one’s own heart and soul—and to the coterminous joys of the universe—involves putting down preconceptions and prejudices inherited and inculcated as we age, and returning to the primal source of all wisdom.
