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(The past is truly a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley told us. Just one to which we can no longer travel. The inhabitants aren’t dead—they are there, in their country, and they cannot leave and join us. The borders are closed.)
It has been said that, if a person is going to die, he should do it in the morning: when the day is new and clean and full of unanswerable questions, when the sun has just risen to cast an afterglow on the things that have been done by night. It has also been said that, if a person is going to die, the circumstances are irrelevant.
How is it you can bear to go among all the loose souls in the world without one voice waiting for you?”
The water was placid, shimmering. The masts of docked ships made a spider forest.
Where was memory? In the brain, the naturalists said, and indeed when the brain was wounded the memory was as well. But how did it live, inside the knotted tissue? Varic’s legs remembered how to walk without his telling them, his hand recalled the grip of a sword or a pen, but where was a summer night at the House, cool air rustling the curtains, the scent of smoky rare oils and warm skin?
