There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

The songs of this land, though seemingly about love or heartbreak, are actually about place—both the beauty and the sadness it embodies. The Ancient Mesopotamians are famed for inventing writing, mathematics, astronomy, irrigation and the wheel, but their biggest discovery has gone unrecognized. They are the first to experience the pain of losing a motherland.

We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honor, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, “Remember us.” It is our way of admitting we were weak and flawed, and that we made mistakes, some inevitable, others foolish, but deep within we appreciated beauty and poetry, too. Each historical artifact, therefore, is a silent plea from ancestors to descendants, “Do not judge us too harshly.” We make art to leave a mark for the future, a slight kink in the river of stories, which flows too fast and too wildly for any of us to comprehend. —