Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

“The world as it is is enough.”