Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

“First you’re climbing inside that dusty Atlas all the time, and now ants again?

Atlas relates to love for Earth

great warning story of Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, who, after his Library Day, would not get off his Perambulator day or night, ignoring his studies and violating every protocol in order to trek alone inside the Atlas until the soles of his feet cracked, and then, according to Mother, his sanity cracked too.

Mrs. Flowers was right: the other kids find the Atlas hilariously obsolete. There’s no jumping or tunneling like in the more sophisticated games in the Games Section: all you do is walk. You can’t fly or build or fight or collaborate; you don’t feel mud grab your boots or raindrops prick your face; you can’t hear explosions or waterfalls; you can hardly leave the roads. And inside the Atlas everything besides the roads is as immaterial as air: walls, trees, people. The only solid thing is the ground.

Again she asks Sybil to check their vital signs.

Mother is very nervous

They’ll use code names from Aristophanes’s The Birds; Rex will be Peisetairos, which means Trustyfriend; Zeno will be Euelpides, Goodhope;

Rex only whispers plans, and Zeno exhales. So long as it stays a rehearsal, so long as the rehearsal never turns into performance.

If Rex was killed, did he die alone? Did he murmur to Zeno in the night as the truck rumbled away, assuming that he was in the barrel next to his? Or did he expect Zeno to fail him all along?

Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.”

she feels so acutely that they have left their planet and star behind, that they move at impossible speeds through a cold and silent void, that there is no turning around.

One day after Ezekiel’s death, Dr. Pori dies, and Zeke’s mother has reportedly lost consciousness. Twenty-one others—one quarter of the people on board—are experiencing symptoms.

And why can’t Sybil, who knows all things, solve it?

Mother maps the minutes before quarantine. Did she pass Mrs. Lee in a corridor, did some microscopic fleck of Ezekiel’s vomit land on her suit, could some of it have splashed into their mouths?

Anxious

“I heard,” says Omicron, staring up through the barrel vault, “that Quarantine Three lasts a year.” “I heard,” whispers Jessi, “that Quarantine Four lasts forever.”

“You said that what’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”

Eventually I grew weary: I had traveled so far, yet was no closer to my destination than when I began. I was a fish inside a sea inside a bigger fish inside a bigger sea, and I wondered if the world itself swam also inside the belly of a much greater fish, all of us fish inside fish inside fish,

city terrifies him. How could men have built such a place? Maher enthuses about the house he’ll choose for himself, how it will have two stories and channels of water running through a garden with pear trees and jasmine, and how he’ll have a dark-eyed wife, and five sons, and at least a dozen three-legged stools—Maher is always talking about three-legged stools. Omeir thinks of the stone cottage in the ravine, his mother making curds, Grandfather toasting pine nuts, and homesickness rolls through him.

Contrast in desire

cleanse the besmirchment from one’s soul before that day comes.

Big word

When the wind is right, she can smell the food they’re cooking. To be so close to men who want her dead. To know that only a partition of masonry prevents them from doing their will.

Both only human

Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.

“Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.”

some in so much agony that they seem reduced to something less than human, as though pain were a leveling wave, a mortar troweled over everything that person once was.

some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with. Sometimes the anger flares inside Omeir too, and he wants nothing more than for God to plunge a fiery fist through the sky and start crushing buildings one after the next until all the Greeks are dead and he can go home.

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.

“Wrong,” I said, “it does exist. Even if you don’t believe in it, I do. Otherwise what’s it all been for?”

Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding?

On the nightstand by the window a blue book with a worn spine rests faceup. On its cover birds swing around the tightly packed towers of a city. The city looks as if it stands on a bed of clouds.

I dreamed again of the summer evenings in Arkadia when the clover grew deep upon the hills, and the happy bells of my ewes filled the air, and the shepherds sat with their pipes, and I wished I had never embarked upon this…

In some other universe, perhaps, a great bright community weeps: their mother and father, aunts and cousins, a little chapel packed with spring roses, a thousand organ pipes resounding with song, Maria’s soul afloat among cherubs, grapevines, and peacocks—like a design from one of her embroideries.

he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.

How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?

In the dark he draws no notice.

Contrast go his usual wacky appearance

You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath.

Somewhere inside the city walls, a glow rises: a sunrise in the wrong place and time. Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.

She takes a slip from a box, and writes, Show me the blue copy with the drawing of a city in the clouds on the cover. A scrap of paper comes fluttering down. The Library contains no records of such a volume. Konstance gazes down the unending rows of shelves. “But I thought you contained everything.”

Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

In our actions, in our attempts to throw some wrenches into the market economy, we hope that no one will die. But if there are a few deaths, isn’t it still worth it? To stop fifteen Holocausts?

The link flashes Join Us Join Us Join Us.

Repitition

died protecting five children who were trapped in a rural library by a terrorist.

The links between narratives are insane

There are things that Sybil doesn’t know. Sybil doesn’t know what it meant to be held by your father inside the leafy green twilight of Farm 4, or how it felt to sift through your mother’s button bag and wonder about the provenance of each button. The Library has no records of a royal blue copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land translated by Zeno Ninis, yet Konstance has seen one inside the Atlas, faceup on Father’s nightstand.

Ai vs reality

Into her mind swims a vision of another library, a less presuming place, hidden inside the walls of her own skull, a library of just a few dozen shelves, a library of secrets: the library of things Konstance knows but Sybil does not.

how it traveled out of the city and to Urbino must be left to the imagination.

Link again

No sign that a public library inside a rickety old blue house was ever here.

Erasure of libraries

Not now, gods. Not tonight. Let these children stay children for another night.

Takes every rosy-cheeked porcelain child off every shelf, inters them in boxes, and deposits the boxes at the thrift shop.

What do these children symbolize?

antediluvian

Word

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

Sheep Shagger, Fruit Punch, Pansy, Zero. Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?

“There are professionals out there working on this,” Zeno says as Sharif locks the door. “Proper translators. People with fancy degrees who actually know what they’re doing.” “Could be,” says Marian. “But none of them are you.”

‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.’ ”

“Who said that?” He shrugs. “Some days she said Aristotle, some days John Wayne. Maybe she made it up.”

Origin is not as significant as principle