[gmw]

“In the hospital,” Sharif says, as he lights a cigarette, “before she died, my mother used to say, ‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.’”

“Who said that?”

He shrugs. “Some days she said Aristotle, some days John Wayne. Maybe she made it up.”

Why did I leave?? Why this compulsion to be elsewhere?, to constantly seek something new? Was hope a curse, the last evil left in Pandora’s jar?

You fly all the way to the end of the stars, and all you want to do is go home …

-- Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021)