The Cloisters

by Katy Hays

I had already learned that no one wanted to hear what loss was really like.

What is life without secrets?

although the Renaissance is often considered an era of logic and science, it was easily seduced by ancient practices that didn’t include geometry and anatomy, but rather a belief in oracles and mystical traditions.

“We long to explain the world around us,” I said. “To make sense of the unknown.”

You don’t have to believe in divination for it to have been true for an aristocrat in the fourteenth century.”

don’t let it wear you down. Make it sharpen you instead.”

“Sometimes,” I said gently, “we can’t trust what we feel. Intuition, a sensation—they’re not proof.”

perhaps one needed a little magic to make a narrow childhood more bearable.

‘If you shut up the truth and bury it underground, it will but grow.’

women can see new patterns better than men.

All we’re doing is weaving together a life. Trying to see where the different threads take us.”

I thought of the Moirai, the Greek weaving goddesses who were said to assign our fate at birth. Clotho spun the fabric of our lives, while Lachesis pulled the thread out. Atropos, the cutter, decided when it would end. The three, it was believed, decided a baby’s fate within a few days of its birth.

it was then that I realized how thin the line is that separates what we know as fate and what we think of as choice—just

That’s the real task of the scholar, to become a necromancer.

Desperation. Always a bad look. Particularly in academia, where we reward effortless achievement, not years of struggle.”

An urban pastoral.

who were oracles if not women who guarded temples of knowledge?

falling in love can make a city burn brighter.