And so we read this, my darling, this book she wrote for you before she left, its ornate words and elaborate illustrations telling fairy tales that will grow as you grow, an apologia, a bundle of letters home, and a map of the unchartered water of our souls.
There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.
-
Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.
-
The stars shine and blink.
We are all guests passing through.
A smile and a name.
-
Our lives are ruled by these small, seemingly ordinary moments that turn out to have improbably large effects. Such randomness is much more common in human affairs than in nature.
That we accept our own frailties and subjectivity does not free us to abdicate the moral responsibility to tell the truth, even if, and especially if, "truth" is not singular but a set of shared experiences and shared understandings that together make up our humanity.
==
I have not felt so reassured by a book as I have read Ken Liu's collection of the Paper Menagerie.
No comments:
Post a Comment