But the main virtue his brother and the naturalist shared was their ability to endow the world with meaning. The stars, the seasons, the forest—Linus had stories about them all, and through these stories life was contained, becoming something that could be examined and understood. Just as the ocean had swelled when Linus was not there to dam its immensity with his words, now, since Lorimer’s illness, the desert had violently expanded to an endless blank. Without his friend’s theories, Håkan’s smallness was as vast as the expanse ahead.
