The Glassmaker

by Tracy Chevalier

Venice and its neighboring islands have always felt frozen in time—and perhaps they are. It is a city built on wooden piles over a lagoon, veined with canals, and its aesthetic and much of its exquisite architecture have remained unchanged for hundreds of years.

People who make things also have an ambiguous relationship with time. Painters, writers, wood-carvers, knitters, weavers and, yes, glassmakers: creators often enter an absorbed state that psychologists call flow, in which hours pass without their noticing. Readers, too.

When you already know how to do something, it can be hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t.

Venice was a chaotic knot of canals and calles and campos; it was much easier to get around by water than on foot.

“Do you like working as a gondolier?” Orsola asked. Domenego shrugged, and she winced at her crass question. Was it even possible to like something you were forced to do?

Perhaps that was the best way to navigate Venice: let the city unroll itself around you and guide you rather than trying to master it with a map in your head.

heavy brow almost permanently furrowed into a frown—not from anger, but from concentrating hard so that she could understand the world around her.

No one wants to hear that they look older; they expect others to confirm they’re as fresh-faced as they want to think they are.

you never recover from losing someone; you just learn to accommodate the hole it makes in you.

The sea inching its way up. But Venice was nimble, it adapted, it relied on its uniqueness, on its timeless beauty, to attract admirers.

She’d heard some say God had sent the virus to force people to change their ways, that this was a giant reset button for humanity.