Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

She hangs the rope and sack around her neck and scratches letters across the surface of her mind. A is ἄλφα is alpha; Β is βῆτα is beta. Ἄστεα are cities; νόον is mind; ἔγνω is learned.

“Seymour, put your hand in my pocket. Do you feel the keys? The car is right outside. Go sit in there, where it’s quiet, do your breathing exercise, and I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

“You mean the Hungarian does not care to what purposes his engines are put?” “There are many people in this world,” Himerius says, “who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid.”

A memory rises: once, years before, Grandfather took him high on the mountain to watch the woodcutters bring down a huge, ancient silver fir, as tall as twenty-five men, a kingdom unto itself. They sang a low, determined song, driving their wedges into its trunk in rhythm as though hammering needles into the ankle of a giant, and Grandfather explained the names of the tools they used, caulks and punks and blocks and spars, but what Omeir remembers now, as the quartermaster rears back with his whip, is that when the tree tipped, its trunk exploding, the men shouting hallo, the air suddenly charged with the ripe, sharp aroma of cracking wood, what he felt was not joy but sorrow. All the timbermen seemed to exult in their collective power, watching branches that for generations knew only starlight and snow and ravens smash down through the undergrowth. But Omeir felt something close to despair, and sensed that, even at his age, his feelings would not be welcome, that he should hide them even from his own grandfather. Why mourn, Grandfather would say, what men can do? There’s something wrong with a child who sympathizes more with other beings than he does with men.

“If any child ever born,” Chryse whispers, “can outsmart them, outlast them, or outrun them, it is you. There is still life to be had. Go tonight, and I will send prayers at your heels.”

For an instant he spins out a possible future, an afternoon argument between Rex and Hillary: Hillary pouts, Rex asks Hillary to leave, Zeno helps clean out all of Hillary’s detritus, carries boxes, unpacks his own suitcase into Rex’s bedroom, sits on the edge of Rex’s bed; they take walks, travel to Egypt, read in silence across a teapot from one another. For a moment Zeno feels that he might be able to speak it into existence: if he says exactly the right words, right now, like a magic spell, it will happen. I think of you all the time, the veins in your throat, the fuzz on your arms, your eyes, your mouth, I loved you then, I love you now.

The world: it’s all he ever loved. The forest behind Arcady Lane, the busy meanderings of ants, the zip and swerve of dragonflies, the rustling of the aspens, the tart sweetness of the first huckleberries of July, the sentinels of the ponderosas, older and more patient than any beings he would ever know, and Trustyfriend the owl on his branch overseeing it all.

Everything we have on board, the grown-ups said, is everything we will ever need. Anything we cannot solve for ourselves, Sybil will solve for us. But this was just a story they told to comfort themselves. Sybil knows everything, and yet she knows nothing.

“The fool you were telling us about. In the story? Even though he keeps going the wrong way, keeps getting turned into the wrong thing, he never gives up. He survives.”

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.