The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

‘Six Chapters from a Floating Life.’

There was silence in the class, and the old woman resumed her knitting as if she were stabbing every king and cleric who ever lived. They could suddenly hear the rain pouring down outside, students’ voices in a courtyard, the old woman’s knitting needles murderously clicking.

She missed Idelba so much that she could not think of it directly, but had to parry it by homages such as these, invoking Idelba’s presence by her habits, as if becoming a kind of Madame Sururi. It occurred to her more than once that there were ways in which we know the dead better than the living, because the actual person is no longer there to distract our thinking about them.