Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

the feeling of handing him over is a feeling like handing over one of her lungs.

Here you have cheese, wine, your friends, and your flock. What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek.”

“The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion.

“One in the morning,” Bunny says, “and one at night. Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.”

Why ·[did I leave?]·? Why this compulsion to be ·[elsewhere?]·, to constantly seek something new? Was hope a curse, ·[the last evil left in Pandora’s jar]·?

You fly all the way to the end of the stars, and all you want ·[to do is go home…]·

But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.”

And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.”

Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.