Above the Fire: A Novel

by Michael O'Donnell

Their business was as ancient as footprints and as simple as onrushing wind. They were free.

To earn a place here, a volume had to endure for generations. It had to be written of a certain quality and it also had to physically last: not to be a text file or a piece of digital ephemera, but to be a physical object, ink printed on paper bound between boards and secured by a spine. It must be stitched well and kept dry. Few of the volumes were what anyone would call fine editions, but they had been constructed in an age when books and other things were made with craftsmanship. The titles dealt in themes greater than any given moment: not fads or trends but matters as old as humanity itself.

This comfortable upper-middle-class boy drowning in possessions was now reduced to a single talisman measuring time. Which, in the end, was all he had. All anyone had.

“‘Three thoughts carry me ahead; the prospect of the northward view from Dolpo to Tibet; the prospect of a free descent across these brilliant snowfields to hot tea and biscuits; and the perception—at this altitude, extremely moving—that these two hands I see before me in the sun, bracing the basket straps, hands square and brown and wrinkled with the scars of life, are no different from the old hands of my father. Simultaneously, I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.’