Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

“The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives.

“Boil the words you already know down to their bones,” Rex says, “and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.”

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss yourself,” he says. “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

“Hunger,” he said, and she had the sense that he was speaking not to her but to the plants, “after a little while you can forget about hunger. But thirst? The worse it gets, the more you think about it.”

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.