Status Updates From Birdsong

“We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.”

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”

“Oh God, oh God.” Weir began to cry. “What have we done? Listen to it. We’ve done something terrible, we’ll never get back to how it was before.”

“Now as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him like the earth was groaning.”

“But he knew what Weir was feeling because he had felt it himself. As he listened to the soil protesting, he heard the sound of a new world. If he did not fight to control himself, he might never return to the reality in which he had lived.”

“I don’t know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That’s why they read books about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for that which childhood normally exhausts. But if a child’s world is broken up by too much reality, that needs to go underground.”

“He would fall like the millions of the dead who had gone down into the mud: baker’s boys from Saxony, farm laborers from France, and factory workers from Lancashire, so much muscle and blood in the earth.”

“The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up the heart.”