Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

he that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.

But now the few people who can make sense of that old writing have a chance to breathe life back into these superheroes so that maybe they can do battle for a few more decades. Erasure is always stalking us, you know? So to hold in your hands something that has evaded it for so long—”

Just like how space girl is saving it from erasure

This. This is why Father left.

Owls = seymour & trustyfriend?

there are no rockets; there is no launchpad. The ship wasn’t assembled in modules in space: it never went to space at all. It’s on Earth.

Shes not in space????

soon as u do your task

?? Oh

as though the curtains have been ripped off the windows of his mind:

Curtains ripped off repetition

two pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks,

Nod to his father? Love for routine/remnants of military

All his life a prologue and now it’s finally going to begin.

All my life, he thinks, my best companions cannot speak the same language as me.

It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.

Zeno sees himself walk out onto the frozen lake.

Frozen lake = acceptance of death

“You’re sure, Sybil?” It is fact.

None of it is real. She stands on a circular Perambulator in a circular room at the center of a circular white structure on a mostly circular island eight miles across Baffin Bay from a remote village called Qaanaaq.

Circles r infinite no start or end

WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU SO DESPERATELY SEEK

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

Then to a pickup truck driving along Wilson Road, its bed jammed with teenagers. A banner streaming behind them reads: You’ll die of old age, we’ll die of climate change. He traces an oval around them, and the truck evaporates.

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.”

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.

as though the codex were a living thing left to his trust and he has endangered it—as though he were charged with a single, simple responsibility, to keep this one thing alive, and has bungled it.

He’s a ropy and pallid man who prefers to eat prepackaged sandwiches at his desk rather than visit the cafeteria, and who finds peace only in work, in accumulating mile after mile on the treadmill like some Dark Age pilgrim walking off a great penance. Occasionally he orders a new pair of shoes, identical to the pair he has worn out.

Recall things you know. Owls have three eyelids. Humans are complicated. For many of the things you love, it’s too late. But not for all.

atavistic