Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World (Aristotle and Dante, #2)

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Other people are given writing instruments—and when they go to school, they are taught to use them. But they don’t give boys like me and Dante pencils or pens or spray paint. They want us to read, but they do not want us to write. What will we write our names with? And where on the map would we write them?

God, let his smile be enough.

“Love is easy and it’s hard. It was that way with me and your father. I wanted him to touch me so much. And I was so afraid.”

“If I had told you, would it have changed anything?”

I didn’t want to be ashamed. And yet, the word “shame” was still a word loitering in my body. It was a word that clung to me, a word that didn’t leave easily.

It’s amazing the capacity we have to lie to ourselves.”

I thought he was only going to teach me how to swim in the waters of this swimming pool. Instead, he taught me how to dive into the waters of life.

Dante, if your mom has a boy—if you get that brother you’ve always wanted—love him. Be good to him. So when he grows up, he won’t be haunted by bad dreams.

Sometimes I had beautiful words living inside of me and I just couldn’t push those words out so that other people could see they were there.

“Oh, Ari, let your sisters love you. Let yourself be loved. For all you know, there’s a long line of people wanting you to let them in.”

I would see a summer storm coming in, and I would breathe in, and understand that the smell of that storm was the smell of God.

The feel of the sand underneath my feet was soft and cool, the harsh elements unable to steal away the leftover innocence of the earth.

Everything—the blue of the sky, the rain in the clouds, the white of the sand, the water in the oceans, all the languages of all the nations, and all the broken hearts that had learned to beat in their brokenness.

So quiet that I felt that I was in a church. And the thought entered my head that my love for Dante was holy, not because I was holy but because what I felt for him was pure.

If you are brave enough to sit and listen to the voice of the universe in the silence that lives within you, then you will always know what matters—and you will know too that you matter more to the universe than you will ever know.

I don’t need to be a hero to be a man.”

I once thought that you could find all the secrets of the universe in someone’s hand. And I think that’s true. I did find all the secrets of the universe in your hand. Your hand, Dante.

If we’re lucky. If we’re very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive.

No one asks to be born. And no one wants to die. We don’t bring ourselves into the world, and when it’s time for us to leave, the decision will not be ours to make. But what we do with the time in between the day we are born and the day we die, that is what constitutes a human life. You will have to make choices—and those choices will map out the shape and course of your life. We are all cartographers—all of us. We all want to write our names on the map of the world.

I can’t protect you from your own pain, Ari. And you can’t protect me from mine. I think every parent has some moments when they say to themselves, If I could take my child’s pain away and make it mine, I would make it mine. But I have no right to take your pain away, because it’s yours.”

It’s a beautiful thing to let the people you love see your pain.”

He didn’t blame other people for the problems of the world. He pointed to the problems of the world within himself and fought a battle to rid himself of them.

To live and never to understand the strange and beautiful mysteries of the human heart is to make a tragedy of our lives.

Stories were living inside us. I think we were born to tell our stories. After we died, our stories would survive. Maybe it was our stories that fed the universe the energy it needed to keep on giving life.

a kind of hurt, the voice of a man whose dreams were slowly, slowly taken from him. I wondered if that would happen to me, too. Would the world conspire to take away my hope—to rip it from me?