The Steady Running of the Hour

It is impossible to live without hardship. The hardship of daily trifles, Ashely explains, ever accumulating and impossible to ignore, is so much meaner than pain or cold or fatigue. These annoyances make one weak and petty and shallow, just as greater struggles make one brave and wise. It's the little things that bring one down. Delayed trains and burnt puddings and drafty rooms. I was never so miserably cold on a mountain as I was in a drafty room. One can rise to dire occasions, but most of the time one worries about one's burnt pudding. It takes real struggle to see what life is. Then you realize you don't give two straws if your pudding's been burnt.

It is impossible to live without danger, Ashley explains. The danger is always there, the hazard of wasted lives, of decades bent over a desk, of squalid and lonely deaths in hospital beds. Fools turned their faces away from danger and pretended at immunity, but others went to the fountainhead of life.

You're everything,' Ashley whispers. 'You're more than everything. The things I never believed in.

It didn't matter. I was young and we were together.

-but what people expect can change you in the end.

All my dreams die hard, but those of you are utterly imperishable.

I may not believe in God, but I still fear him.

One doesn't see beautiful things in the mountains. One becomes them.

I imagine the mad forces that might have conspired to produce all this, the arcane weaving of threads that ends with me on a dirt road in Iceland. It was impossible. It required the gathering of whole constellations, a harvest of countless stars funneled into a single cup and rolled out, a pair of sixes, a million times in perfect succession. But it had happened. Already I'd seen the proof of it and held it in my hands. And it happened again every moment, for surely the meeting of any two souls required the same arithmetic. If it seemed improbable, maybe that was only my own narrowness of vision. Mireille said there might not be an end to this. But if I could reach an ending, was it possible that the veil would be lifted, that I'd rise to a higher vantage point and see something utterly simple, the purest design of all?

Sooner or later one realizes it isn't enough to be clever, to have even the finest ideas. One must do something, one must create some corner of goodness in the world, however small.

Imogen creaks open the door. She steps from the stifling heat through the doorway, a tentative foot onto the ice-clumped doormat. At once her senses are overcome by the wonder of the outside world. The movement of the bracing air, its scent of pine and wood smoke from the chimney; the luminosity of the snowy surface, the light glinting from every crystal of every snowflake. What sublime richness to everything.

I'm not so good as you,' Imogen says. 'But I don't care.