Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? —Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge—a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.

Circles are wondrous because they are endless. Anything endless is wondrous. But endlessness is torture, too. I knew the horizon could never be caught but still chased it. What I have done is foolish; I had no choice but to do it.

In my blip of higher education, I had time to take Intro to Philosophy and learn about the panopticon, the hypothetical prison Jeremy Bentham came up with, where there would be one itty-bitty guardhouse at the center of a giant ring of cells. One guard was all you needed because he might be watching at any time, and the idea of being watched matters way more than actually being watched. Then Foucault turned the whole thing into a metaphor about how all you need to discipline and dominate a person or a population is to make them think it’s possible they’re being watched.

You could tell the professor wanted us all to think the panopticon was scary and awful, but later, after Archangel made me way too famous, I wanted to take Katie McGee’s preposterous time machine back to that lecture hall and ask him to consider the opposite. Like instead of one guard in the middle, you’re in the middle, and thousands, maybe millions, of guards are watching you—or might be—all the time, no matter where you go.

Maybe she had needed the dangerous proximity of the plane, its roar and the red flash of its wings to jolt her from obliviousness. Or maybe the moment was simply right. She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.

It seemed to her that Jamie had an obligation to go along with her whims. He should have recognized her determination as immovable and done as she’d asked.

She knew Jamie would come soon to console her, and everything would be all right again.

Opportunities were limited, but she would find a way because she must be a pilot. She couldn’t fathom that others did not see her for what she would become, that she did not wear the fact of her future like some eye-catching garment. Her belief that she would fly saturated her world, presented an appearance of absolute truth.

But Jamie knows better than to do any of these things. In the light from the moon, she can see him watching her with the melancholy of someone who has cared for and released a wild animal, hoping it will find its way on its own.

Does she regret the flight? She decides she doesn’t. She would have peered out of the cockpit and into something bottomless and unfathomable sooner or later. At some point she would have found the edge of her own courage. There is nothing for it but to adjust, be humbled. So she is not exactly who she had thought. So what. She will be someone different.

He thought that when he and Sarah had walked around the lake he must have conveyed his feelings about animals, the burden of his anguish for them. Even if he hadn’t, he thought she ought to have intuited something. Or, really, he thought she ought to feel the same way he did.

I’ve learned—too slowly, but I have learned—that attempts to control others are likely to backfire. I worked for the passage of Prohibition because I earnestly believed women’s lives would be better—easier, as you say—if their husbands couldn’t go out and drink their paychecks away and come home and do the vile things drunk men sometimes do. But I was naïve. People’s wishes for their own lives tend to outweigh others’ ideas about how they should behave.” She paused. “We must bend in the wind sometimes, Jamie. So much is beyond our control.”

Marian had written: The world unfurls and unfurls, and there is always more. A line, a circle, is insufficient. I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What’s past is lost. I am already lost to my future.

What would have happened if, when they’d first met, Barclay had simply set his mind on seducing her? She would have gone willingly enough. Why all the fuss? He’d needed to break the feral pull between them, tame and subdue it. Since the wedding, though, she had sensed some buried, unacknowledgeable regret in him. He could neither tolerate wildness nor reconcile himself to its loss.

She hadn’t anticipated how much of her behavior after marriage would be motivated by a wish not to argue.

Looking at Jamie was like seeing a vision of herself as a man, full of certainty that things could be set right, full of faith that new possibilities would always arise.

“Jamie and I would have been children in that house in New York. I can’t imagine it. If you change one thing, you change everything.”

One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both.

“For comfort, I think. I get a feeling sometimes, like something terrible is chasing me, getting closer. I felt that way driving back. If I’d known you’d take care of me, I would have called for you, not Kate.”

the inevitable collapse of goodwill between two people with intertwined yet irreconcilable wishes.

We think each new romantic prospect, each new lover, is a fresh start, but really we’re just tacking into the wind, each new trajectory determined by the last, plotting a jagged yet unbroken line of reactions through our lives. That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just getting buffeted along, never setting a destination.

She said, “And what about love? Are you searching for that, too?” “I’m probably more likely to find enlightenment.” “Is it possible they’re the same thing?” “No,” I said, “I think they’re opposites.”

I have a feeling I have reached a juncture full of consequences that can’t be anticipated but will later seem inevitable.

The fury, logically, exists only within the confines of his mind, his body, but it seems so much bigger and stronger than he is, elemental, something that might break him apart from the inside.

The landscape is secretive and harsh and impossibly immense, and she borrows some of its inscrutability for herself, its disinterest in human goings-on.

Her deadly confidence reminded me of a bird of prey, a hawk or a falcon. “A piece of advice for you,” she said. “Knowing what you don’t want is just as useful as knowing what you do. Maybe more.”

Caleb said he thought all living things knew about death, at least enough to struggle against it.

The paintings were halfway between one thing and another. He’d needed to make them, but only in order to experience destroying them.

He says, “Do you think you’ll ever marry again?” “No.” “I thought maybe you and Caleb, someday.” “No. Can you imagine? Two hawks in a box.”

But he said he believed, most of the time, that an unachievable intention was the worthiest kind. My flight has as its stated intention a plain and, I believe, achievable goal, but that intention has arisen from my own inherently unachievable desire to understand the scale of the planet, to see as much as can be seen. I wish to measure my life against the dimensions of the planet.

Was love worth cultivating even if it came to nothing?

“I’m only saying it’s easy enough to tell others to be brave when you’ve always chosen the safest path.” “That’s not fair. We’re not all as free as you to choose our own way.” “Choose, yes. You said you wished you were less conventional—well, you could have been, but you chose over and over again to do what was expected. And that’s fine, but don’t pretend someone else made you this way.”

Marian absorbed her careful blondness, the red silk of her belted dress. She seemed a lacquered and corrected sort of person, a flattering portrait of a woman painted atop that very woman.

Why did she have this impulse to throw herself at boundaries, be flung back by them? She felt the beginnings of fear, like frostbite beginning in the warm core of her instead of on her skin.

What I wanted was to scrape my whole life away, cast aside everyone I knew because everyone I knew had disappointed me, build a new existence from scratch. I wanted to escape the system of my past, all the chain reactions. I wanted to be the big bang.

I guess when people are being reminded all the time they might die—they will die—they make more of an effort to be alive. Don’t you think?”

Maybe I want to leave something with you so I have an excuse to see you again—yes, I do—but really the reason I’ll come back is because I love you, and what I’ve left of myself can never be reclaimed.

“It doesn’t matter what’s easy,” he said. “There’s just what you do and what you don’t do.”

I think maybe it was more that I’ve had stuff about myself, information, get launched out into the world—or I’ve done the launching—and I’m not sure what difference it makes, how much strangers know about you. They still don’t know anything.

Why go at all? I have no answer beyond my certainty that I must. —marian graves

Does that mean I wish to die? I don’t think I do. But the pure and absolute solitude in which we leave the world exerts a pull.

Marian had stared at Zip, waiting to be overcome, but felt only pressure and heaviness, then nothing. Jamie’s death had rent and torn her in such a way that she was no longer watertight; her emotions drained out, leaving her empty. So passed her grief for Ruth—she was too ruined to hold it.

If they are extraordinarily lucky and also don’t make anything except the best possible decisions at all times, they will complete what they are setting out to do. Or they will fail. Or they will die, which is different from failure.

It was a simple thing, in the end, to begin. —marian graves

measuring the difference between where they are going and where they mean to go. That’s where life is, that wedge of discrepancy.

Their love meant everything, changed nothing. Their trajectories would continue along, unbowed by it.

The fear in her is smothered almost to nothing by the necessity of focus, of action. She will not remember how she comes to conclude that the plane itself must be lost, sacrificed, that she must try, if she can, to keep her survival a secret, that the only way she can contend with continued life is to make a new one. These decisions will become simple facts of her past, way points at which she turned, altering her destination. Any ambivalence she feels, any counterarguments she makes to herself will be lost, erased by the immutability of what has been done.