Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel

The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets. For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway. Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world.

Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. Th

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That is all we have, this moment with the world. It will not last, because nothing lasts. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and no matter how much we find along the way, life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees... See more

He gulps down air, trying to fill his lungs, but the air feels heavier than it ought to feel. It doesn’t look like there’s anyone here to wake him up this time. In the old days there were bands of horsemen, sometimes even a king, in person, when the need was dire. Then it became army lorries, or circles of druids in white shifts, slightly surprised

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It is uncontainable, he cannot stand it: the comet is only going to rise, and equally dispense its pearly light on love offered and met and refused and mistaken, the law of harmonies unfailingly in operation on the human heart. He hears the ticking of his watch, and music drifting down from Lowlands House: everything that would ever happen had happ

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