Students of Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet discover themselves enriched by a generous education in the modern sensibility.  Taking the wasteland of Alexandria as his laboratory, Durrell experiments with powerful contemporary ideas in order to subvert comfortable old notions of empiricism, rationality, and absolute space and time. From the ensuing chaos, Durrell creates a new synthesis. Einsteinian physics, with its rejection of absolute time and space, and Jungian psychology, with its turn toward the mystic and occult, are two important elements in this synthesis. Alchemy, or hermetism, which originated in Alexandria as a blend of Gnosticism, Greek science, and metallurgy, is used by Durrell as an interface between the physics and the psychology of the Quartet.

Deus Loci 1 (1992): 45-60.

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