Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?

“In the hospital,” Sharif says, as he lights a cigarette, “before she died, my mother used to say, ‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.’ ”

But what’s so beautiful about a fool, he says, is that a fool never knows when to give up. It was Grandmom who used to say that.

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.

Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.