Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.

Too little fear and you don’t pay enough attention; too much and you freeze.

the littlest streams, high on the mountain, small enough to dam with your hand, would eventually join the river, and that the river, though quick and violent, was but a drop in the eye of the great Ocean that encircles all the lands of the world, and contains every dream everyone has ever dreamed.

“Antiquity was invented to be the bread of librarians and schoolmasters.”

“For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has.”

“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.”

“In a time,” he says, “when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown…” He gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. “Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible.”

Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.

Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you’re never the same: not quite.

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

Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.

from these Icarian heights, my feathers powdered with the dust of the stars, I saw the earth far below as it really was, a little mud-heap in a great vastness, its kingdoms only cobwebs, its armies only crumbs.

“When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it,” Rex says, “or a single line quoted in somebody else’s text, the potential of what’s lost haunts you. It’s like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become.” Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

to find one sentence, Zeno—even a few words—of a literary work that was previously unknown? To rescue one phrase from oblivion? It’s the most exciting thing, I can’t tell you: it’s like digging up one end of a buried wire and realizing that it’s connected to someone eighteen centuries dead.

The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.

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

The world: it’s all he ever loved. The forest behind Arcady Lane, the busy meanderings of ants, the zip and swerve of dragonflies, the rustling of the aspens, the tart sweetness of the first huckleberries of July, the sentinels of the ponderosas, older and more patient than any beings he would ever know, and Trustyfriend the owl on his branch overseeing it all.

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand.

It’s dirty and wormholed, colonized with mold, as though fungal hyphae, time, and water have collaborated to make an erasure poem. But to Zeno it looks magical, the Greek characters seeming to glow somewhere deep beneath the page, white on black, not so much handwriting as the specter of it.

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

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

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.

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

“In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom.”

By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. 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.

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.”

the green beauty of the ·[broken?]· world.

And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, 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.”

Time: the most violent war engine of all.