The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

Fairy tales, however, do not always end happily—in fact, quite often it’s the opposite, despite what modern retellings may ask you to believe. That was a difficult lesson to learn; perhaps I am learning it still.

The most important thing is to continue to do the thing you want to, to keep battling on. That, in my opinion, is the main part of the struggle. Most give up when it seems too difficult.”

It is the awareness that that past is only to be viewed as a halcyon, barely believable time—a lost paradise. After it, everything had changed—for them both, for the world.

“When I first saw her, I was still young enough to associate beauty with goodness. Though some people, perhaps, never relinquish that idea.” He smiled. “Artists, in particular, have to be wary of making that mistake.

They are both slightly to the wrong side of tipsy, and the time has come for the sort of confidences best made in this state.

“I don’t think it can be a shameful thing,” she says, “to follow the thing you love.”

This is what it is to be young: this is what people mean when they talk about the freedom and folly of youth, the reckless glamour of it. It is the purest sort of intoxication, this flying over rough ground so that the breath is knocked out of you, whizzing through the world with such power and grace and danger.

I have always felt that to be an artist, of the true sort, and therefore the only sort that matters, you must believe in your vocation absolutely. To hope is not enough.

This was what happened, I thought, when you let someone beyond the barrier you had set up: you opened up the possibility for pain. Yet, despite my fears, I could not make myself regret it. Because I had not felt that close to being happy in a long time.

She is aware only of the peculiar delight of being mistress of her own destiny, answerable to no one but herself.

She does not say it aloud, but the wind unnerves her. It is the inevitability of it, perhaps, that makes her think of those other inarguable forces: fate, time.

Nothing stays still, it says: not air, not sand, not one moment stretched greedily between two lovers. Life is movement and violence.

“For the time being I keep them here to remind me of her, the girl that I was. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that she and I are one and the same person. For all her faults—for all the selfishness, the naïveté, I still want to remember her.”