Under Heaven

How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.

The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was.

Full moon is falling through the sky. Cranes fly through clouds. Wolves howl. I cannot find rest Because I am powerless To amend a broken world. Sima Zian added, "I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is.

Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came. You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed.

Truth" when examining events and records of the past was always precarious, uncertain. No man could say for certain how the river of time would have flowed, cresting or receding, bringing floods or gently watering fields, had a single event, or even many, unfolded differently. It is in the nature of existence under heaven, the dissenting scholars wrote, that we cannot know these things with clarity. We cannot live twice, or watch as moments of the past unfurl, like a courtesan's silk fan. The river flows, the dancers finish their dance. If the music starts again it is starting anew, not repeating itself.

There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?

I love the way folktale and fantasy tap into the roots of story telling. The paradox, for me, is that by moving a story into the fantastic we can actually bring it closer to the reader, not move it further away. It is more than an escape. When we read of the only daughter of a fisherman (or the third son of a woodcutter) in a fairy tale, we are all that character. That's the underlying pulse beat of such tales. Using the fantastic as a prism for the past, if done properly, removes the tale from distancing specificity. It can't just be read as unique to a time and place; it is universalized in interesting, powerful ways. When I wrote Tigana, about the way tyranny tries to erase identity in conquered peoples, the fantasy setting seems to have done exactly that: I'm asked in places ranging from Korea to Poland to Croatia to Quebec, "Were you writing about us?" I was. All of them. That is the point. The fantastic is a tool in the writer's arsenal, as potentially powerful as any there is, and any tool we have works to the benefit of the reader.

I didn't ask to be made a princess." This time all three of them laugh, although it is gentle enough. "Who chooses their fate?" It is the third one, the tallest. "Who asks to be born into the times that are theirs?" "Well, who accepts the world only as it comes to them?" she says, too quickly.

The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn’t know which of them it was.

And it is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.

Full moon is falling through the sky. Cranes fly through clouds. Wolves howl. I cannot find rest Because I am powerless To amend a broken world.

We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is.

Here the world is all the world may be

There was a new hole in the world where sorrow could enter.

One of the pleasures of dealing with intelligent men, Lin Fong decided, watching seven people ride out the eastern gate in early-morning sunlight, was how much did not have to be spoken.

I want to kill someone," Tai said. A pause to consider this. "I am familiar with the desire. It is sometimes effective. Not invariably.

The world is not something to be understood. It is vanity, illusion to even try.

He’d stopped permitting himself to be unhappy about it.