A Brightness Long Ago

by Guy Gavriel Kay

We see only glimpses of history, even our own. It is not entirely ours—in memory, in writing it down, in hearing or in reading it. We can reclaim only part of the past. Sometimes it is enough . . .

Opportunities given are responsibilities.

We accumulate sins and guilt, just by moving through our days, making choices, doing, not doing.

fear was something you mastered, not a thing that defined you. Folco told all of them that, often. You didn’t deny you felt it, you ruled it.

Maybe it is the art that will outlive us all.

I haven’t always found that it is our intentions, the decisions we make, that shape and guide our lives. The opposite, just as often, it seems to me. Impulse creates our stories, or chance, the entirely unforeseen. And what we remember of our own past can be unpredictable. I didn’t learn this at school in Avegna, but I think Guarino would have agreed. Beyond that, we are often borne where the winds of our time carry us. We might sail where we like in a ship—until a storm overtakes us, or pirates, boarding at sunrise. Calm waters and easy winds allow an illusion of mastery, control. But it is only ever that. The devout say we must trust in Jad. I have come to believe life is easier for them. Reversals are more easily dealt with when there is faith. I have seen too much by now to be truly devout any more, though I still fear judgment for that sliding towards heresy, especially when I’m awake at night, and I often am. It is an uneasy world one walks through when there is no firm belief in what will come after, or that what happens to us as we live through our days is affected by the correctness of our faith. I don’t talk about this, of course.

Perhaps in the darkest times all we can do is refuse to be part of the darkness.

I don’t think of myself as a violent man, but I am surely a child of my time, as we all must be.

We are what we are and the world is what it is,

Why is there always sadness, she thinks, entangled with joy? Why is that how life must be?

Then she admitted something to herself: of course she would have. Fortune’s wheel might spin, but you could also choose to spin it, see how it turned, where it took you, and she was still young, and this was the life she wanted.

We like to believe, or pretend, we know what we are doing in our lives. It can be a lie. Winds blow, waves carry us, rain drenches a man caught in the open at night, lightning shatters the sky and sometimes his heart, thunder crashes into him bringing the awareness he will die. We stand up, as best we can under that. We move forward as best we can, hoping for light, kindness, mercy, for ourselves and those we love. Sometimes these things come, sometimes they do not.

It wasn’t important, but of course it was.

“You’ll break hearts before you’re done, Guidanio Cerra.

“Are you afraid of life?” he asked. His voice was quiet. “Of opening a door your hand is on?”

But isn’t it also true sometimes that the only way a person survives after they die is in the memories of others?

The rain misses the cloud as it falls through the world.

I know this is not true, but truth and memory do not easily dance together, as we say in Seressa.