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I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island.
“Mama, why do you remember all the things that have been disappeared? Why can you still smell the ‘perfume’ that everyone else has forgotten?” She looked out through the window for a moment, gazing at the moon, and then brushed some stone dust from her apron. “I suppose because I’m always thinking about them,” she said, her voice a bit hoarse.
“If you read a novel to the end, then it’s over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I’d much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.”
No matter how careful we are, we all leave behind little bits of ourselves as we go about our lives.
Time is a great healer. It just flows on all of its own accord.”
“In general,” he continued, “most things you worry about end up being no more than that—just worries.”
A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”
“They may be nothing more than scraps of paper, but they capture something profound. Light and wind and air, the tenderness or joy of the photographer, the bashfulness or pleasure of the subject. You have to guard these things forever in your heart. That’s why photographs are taken in the first place.”
Important things remain important things, no matter how much the world changes,”
Perhaps some memories never perish, even in this cold.”
Memories are a lot tougher than you might think. Just like the hearts that hold them.”
Maybe there’s a place out there where people whose hearts aren’t empty can go on living.”
“I remember hearing a saying long ago: ‘Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,’ ” I said.
In the end, we found that each statue concealed a single object, different from the others. One was so tiny we almost failed to notice it, another was wrapped in oiled paper, a third had a complicated shape. There was a black one, a sharp one, a fuzzy one, a thin one, a sparkly one, a soft one…
Is the hiding of disappeared items a metaphor for putting undesirable aspects/qualities of ourselves behind a wall so that, while theyre still preserved for us, theyre not in plain sight for others to judge anymore? Is it better to hide things away where they wont be seen again or better to have the memory and let the objects themselves be destroyed?
