The Cloud of Unknowing: A Novel

by Thomas H. Cook

Send out a beam of ghostly light, and pierce this cloud of unknowing.

“‘Talent hits a target no one else can reach. Genius hits a target no one else can see.’”

acknowledging the hard but inescapable fact of how thin it is, the line between clarity and confusion, correctness and error, and that it is this cloudy, insubstantial thread that alone supports the weighty illusion of control.

“Suspicion is a shifting shade,”

WE ARE ALL, ALL SPECTACULARLY FLAWED. True to her training, she supplies the citation:Jean-Paul Sartre. A bland insight, you decide, but fatally true.

“We are all spectacularly flawed,”

She would have noticed “weather,” noticed that Santori had applied a meteorological term to the buffeting we take in life, the thermals that drag us down or lift us to grand but perilous heights. Or was it a geological reference, Diana would have wondered, the work of wind and water, the wearing down of stone.

You see it all again, the whole desperate scene, the two of you no longer seeing or hearing each other, both reduced to primitive bits of psychic flint, good for nothing but producing sparks, setting lives on fire.

We are like the earth. The surface temperatures may vary, but at the core, we’re all on fire.