Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it?

Crows, like most birds, can’t turn their eyes in the socket like we can; to change their view, to look in a new direction, they have to change their posture.

It’s nothing but worry, such worry you wish you didn’t care about them at all, when you care about them more than anything.

Child rearing

How, he wondered, could you know the names of things, and not know the things?

What had always divided them—that she saw the world as full of beings alive and alert and looking at her, and he saw few, all of them in their ordinary bodies—only grew.

the Crows could somehow carry him off and also return and go on picking at his carcass on the rock ledge till there was no good left in it, and that didn’t confuse the People, then why should it stop the Crows?

the dead from whom the living learned to live, even as those dead had learned from others who lived and died before them.

They were nothing but what they meant, and it was what they meant that changed.

That’s why we mourn for the dead, Crow: not only for our loss but for theirs.”

He knew by then that he would never find her or see her again—for if he could have, he would have: she would have found him. Yet still he believed that she’d appear again, any day, because of how much he needed her to. That was what did the harm, knowing the one, believing the other.

“It’s not good to die,” Fox Cap said. “But it’s not good to live forever, either. Grow old enough and you’ll know it.”

it was he who, in his difference from Crow-kind, had become one of hers.

you never do go back anywhere. You only go on.

you could go right around the trunk of the tree of the world and return to where you started.

“Can you have enough life?” she said. “You can’t have more.”

He was girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through.

heaven had been distant: the lands beyond death lay at the end of a long astral journey, a shining city, a far shore.

Only by entering into the suffering of others with all their being could they free those whose dreadful deaths trapped them in the grief and horror in which they had died.

those (they can be Crows or People) who are devoted to the diurnal, to the this and that of a well-ordered life (to the extent that any Crow life can be well-ordered) and yet whose poise and grace transform those things to worth above all others.

He had an idea—an idea that he now seemed to have been nurturing for a long time—about a land he might go to, a land that lies far that way, or ought to; where winters are white and long, and Ravens are lords.

shut by the pressure of the generality of the living, who nowadays don’t imagine it’s possible to pass through such a door, or no longer need to claim the right of entrance. Alive or dead, you can’t go to heaven or the Isle of the Blessed or any other of the lands of the shades unless you believe that they await you, that the gates are open—

Was the land of our dead like a shop gone out of business, like a temple whose god has departed and whose priests have abandoned it?

Only the living can travel there from here, cross the river, see and speak to those they know or know of, take away its treasures. The living create the Land of Death and its inhabitants by going