Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

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.

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

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

‘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.

Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.

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.

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…]·

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.”

Time: the most violent war engine of all.