A Brightness Long Ago

by Guy Gavriel Kay

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.

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

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.

We want to sink into the tale, leave our own lives behind, find lives to encounter, even to enter for a time. We can resist being reminded of the artificer, the craft. We want to be immersed, lost, not remember what it is we are doing, having done to us, as we turn pages, look at a painting, hear a song, watch a dance. Still, that is what is being done to us. It is. Even so . . . we do turn the page, and can be lost again. And in that deep engagement we may find ourselves, or be changed, because the stories we are told become so much of what we are, how we understand our own days.

One is not foolishly anxious or afraid if there really are those who want one deposed and dead,

Not every gift is ours, even with desire.

We are what we are in the world, when it allows.

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.

Perhaps as often as we dream of things we wish might come to be, we dream of what we wish had been otherwise. We are carried forward through time, but our minds take us back.

Shelter can be hard to find. A place can become our home for reasons we do not understand. We build the memories that turn into what we are, then what we were, as we look back. We live in the light that comes to us.

but truth and memory do not easily dance together,

We weren’t a matter of sorrow or concern to this man, we were material for a painting or a sculpture. Our faces, postures, the mood in the room, the morning light from the windows. Artists, I thought (for the first time but not the last), could be cold people.

We are always the person we were, and we grow into someone very different, if we live long enough. Both things are true.