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What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?
No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find stren...
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But the river only laughs, in its soft, slippery way, the burble of water over stone.
A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.
Sam has an artist’s eye, present, searching, the kind that studies their subject and sees something more than shapes.
Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods.
If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
Time has no face, no form, nothing to fight against.
“Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?”
So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.
“but a woman must take responsibility for her own education, for no man truly will.”
Ideas are wilder than memories.
And you are convinced, if only you had prayed to him instead of me, he would have shown you such kindness and such mercy.”
“You look at me and see a man, though you know I am nothing of the sort. This shape is only an aspect, designed for the beholder.”
“Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”
What is the point in planting seeds? Why tend them? Why help them grow? Everything crumbles in the end. Everything dies.
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”
he is beginning to suspect no one is ever ready, not when the moment comes, not when the darkness reaches out to claim its prize.
