All the Seas of the World

Maybe home for some is always the one they lost.

The effect of being violently driven from home, and that home being despoiled .... it can go on and on like sea-surf against rocks. On and on within a man or a woman, or within a child as it grows up somewhere else, never sat home, only away.

Silence, he thought, could sometimes be loud.

people die in stories, as in life. It is embedded in the world we have and in many of the tales we tell, if they are to register for us as containing, sharing, certain kinds of truth. Sometimes these are figures at the heart of what we are reading or hearing. Sometimes they are not. But even so, even if they have only just walked into it on a night in a city far from their own, we must imagine them as having people who loved them, for whom their absence will loom large, even if it does not in the story we are being told. If we take a moment for them it is also a moment taken for ourselves. For those who love us, those we love.

She would own herself, Lenia Serrana thought, walking through the market square of Sorenica. Herself and her sorrows. Nor, in truth, was she at all distinctive in having to deal with those. Everyone had different griefs, but everyone had griefs.

It was good to feel laughter, to release it. To believe it was permitted. That many things might now, finally, be allowed. We are vulnerable when we feel that way. But not, in truth, any more than when we live curtailed, held back, enraged, afraid. Everything is, indeed, always changing. And not usually to be controlled by us, the children of earth and sky, with fortune’s wheel always turning and a future we cannot know. •

On pain of banishment from the rites. The usual,” said Piero Sardi. But he made the sign of the sun disk, as if in contrition for being wry. When men grew older, Folco thought, they often seemed to become aware of their approaching end, and of what might come after. The holy rites, access to them, mattered even more? Hadn’t happened to him yet, but he could sense that state of mind, as a distant cloud on a clear afternoon turning towards twilight.

You can indeed die at the margins of a story, but you are as dead as if it were your own tale ending and never told.