Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

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.

He remembers when Rex’s letter arrived, how at first he could not allow himself to believe that Rex had survived. Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

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.

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.

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.”

he is Aethon turning his back on immortality, happy to be a fool once more,