Out of Oz (Wicked Years, #4)

by Gregory Maguire

Though Kansans set store on the notion of revelation, they are skeptical when asked to accept any whole-cloth gospel not measurable by brass tacks they’ve walloped into the dry goods counter themselves.

Though who knows the architecture of the mind, and whether the arches that open upon discrete episodes are ordered in any way sequentially?

Within a few moments the last of day became the first of night, a magic as peculiar and welcome as any other.

The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

All his previous disasters danced attendance upon him now, a big lousy finish. That nightly inquisition, as character relievedly dissolves into oblivion: Who are you really?

But but but. The endless clockwork spin of self-doubt. He had come to no conclusion in his roundabout reflections. Sleep rescued him temporarily from the obligation to fret about it any longer.

Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view.

“Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.”

I’m a woman grown from a life broken in the middle. I’m not even a cousin of that girl I was so long ago. I see her life like an illustrated weekly story I read long ago, and it is pictures of that that I carry in my head.

But they’d been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.

A mathematically perfect pivot, equal amounts of hope on one side and, on the other, alarm that the hope might be unfounded, that this revelation might yet be a mocking lie.

The stage curtains yawned open like a fresh wound.

She could tell this man wanted her to soothe him somehow. Burning words in his head? She didn’t know what they might be, and it wasn’t her job to put them out.

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable.

Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

Trism lived in Liir’s heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once.

As years pass, and the abundance of the future is depleted, the crux of old mistakes and the cost of old choices are ever recalibrated. Resentment, the interest in umbrage derived from being wronged, is computed minute by minute, savagely, however you try to ignore it.

Some fights between couples don’t so much roil to a climax as settle somehow in an unnegotiated standoff. Neither “affable truce” nor “benefit-of-the-doubt stalemate” quite describes it.

He thought, Anyone who can be home anywhere really has no home at all.

Sometimes you say something to be pretty and it turns out to be pretty accurate.

He was the only article of faith that stood between her and the edge of the cliff, which looked eager to buckle if only she gave it half a chance.

You have your life, that scrappy thing you keep dragging after you as long as you can. Less visible than the weightless shadow you also drag but oh, so much heavier.

I want no more love and no more regret than the investments I’ve already made.

“Will you love me whatever I say?” “No. I don’t promise that. I may have made my own choices, for my own reasons, but I won’t love you unless you make your own choices, for your own reasons. That’s the bargain of love.”

“With your proboscis, you can’t smell the difference between your own kin and someone foreign?” she said, laughing. “With my proboscis,” he said, “I can smell that there is no difference. I will not help you.”

But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.

We don’t get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our license to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there’s no place remotely like home.

She felt full of a salty disgust, an objection deep in the blood. She had done nothing but wing through her shallow days on earth like a shadow of something else, something only windborne, without initiative, without merit or aim.

She hadn’t needed to hide her whole life long. No one wanted to find her anyway.

“I don’t know what good I could do.” “None of us does. That doesn’t let us off the hook.”

“Writing never helped a soul to do a thing.” “Except, maybe, to think.”