There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

“Riddles are how Lady Truth cloaks herself.” “Why would truth need to cloak herself?” “Because if she were to walk about naked, people would stone her in the streets.”

The wealthy do not have to rush after ticking clocks; they simply glide through each day, dandling the hours in their hands, wearing them like elegant gloves. For the poor, however, time is mere rags, tattered scraps that are never enough, no matter how much you pull and tug at them, neither covering goose-pimpled flesh nor providing any warmth.

She doesn’t need to check the clock to know what it will say: 3:34 a.m. She often wakes, to the minute, at this interstice between midnight and dawn. Brahmamuhurtha, the time of the Creator, when light energy is at its strongest, according to various faiths. The most opportune moment to burrow into your own soul and face your deepest fears, they say.

For her, it is not about that. Not prayer, not meditation. It is the hour of melancholy—pure, unfiltered, restless.

As they say, in this part of the world, if you run too fast, you will miss the safe place where you might have hidden yourself.”

“But you didn’t forget!” says Narin, eager to cheer him up. “You remember Al-Jazari! And Grandma remembers!” “Yes, sweetheart,” Father says, nodding. “We are the memory tribe.”

Home is where your absence is felt, the echo of your voice kept alive, no matter how long you have been away or how far you may have strayed, a place that still beats with the pulse of

your heart.

Poverty has a topography all of its own. It rises from the ribs of the earth, stretching its naked limbs against the sky, its features dry and gaunt, sore to the touch. Poverty is a nation with no borders, and he is no foreigner in it but a native son.

Discomfort is not an emotional state but a doorway she easily passes through several times a day.

“Where you have set your mind begin the journey Let your heart have no fear, keep your eyes on me.”

“Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry into your personal life. All I’m saying is, one needs to keep an eye on that Gratitude fish, I learned to my cost.”

Sometimes your biggest strength becomes your worst weakness.

But it’s actually a useful reminder that someone can be cultured and polished, generous, worldly, but still commit acts of startling cruelty.”

“We are all like clay tablets, chipped around the edges, hiding our little secrets and cracks.”

Stories venture beyond city walls, traverse deserts and span ravines. To write is to free yourself from the constraints of place and time. If the spoken word is a trick of the gods, the written word is the triumph of humans.

It is an odd thing, to lose faith in the beliefs you once held firmly. How strange it is to have carried your convictions like a set of keys, only to realize they will not open any doors.

He cannot collect his thoughts; and his sentences, when he finally manages to write, dangle awkwardly, like broken limbs that have yet to be set.

even the worst villains knew, deep down, that what they did was wrong. They did not pretend otherwise. They might try to justify their actions and even adopt the appearance of virtue to hoodwink others into thinking them good, but they did not, for a moment, imagine themselves to be virtuous. By contrast, the fanatics who slaughter the innocent and defenseless, pillaging villages, enslaving women and children, believe themselves to be holy. With every sorrow and suffering they rain on other humans, they expect to earn favor in the eyes of God, move closer to completing the bridge from this world to their exclusive paradise. How can anyone assume they will please the Creator by hurting His Creation?

He is used to seeing value in things others have been quick to discard.

When the levees break and the banks burst, they leave trauma behind—a story to be told from one generation to the next. Mesopotamian lore understands that water is the defining force of life. Trees are “rooted water,” streams are “flowing water,” birds are “flying water,” mountains are “rising water,” and, as for humans, they are, and will always be, “warring water,” never at peace. Water has memory. Rivers are especially good at remembering.

August is the worst of times to travel from Nineveh to Castrum Kefa. It is less a month than an elegy for the vibrant songs of spring, a lament that floats through the desiccated stalks and brittle reeds bowed by the wind. Arthur eats little. It is hard to have an appetite when the sun is merciless.

But now, as he traverses this desolate landscape, it seems to him that what they call civilization is, in truth, a storm in waiting. Powerful, protean and perfectly destructive, sooner or later it will burst free of its barriers and engulf everything in its insatiable path.

Faith is a bird, they say, and it cannot be kept locked up, however gilded you make its cage. Set it free, send it afar, and it may or may not return.

Everyone in this world has some bent or inclination which, if fostered by favorable circumstances, will color the rest of his life.

But Arthur is convinced that everyone has a gift. Given a chance and a modicum of support, anyone can elevate their skill. In the end, perhaps what separates one individual from another is not talent but passion. And what is passion if not a restlessness of the heart, an intense yearning to surpass your limits, like a river overflowing its banks?

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.