What about stars?
Are you going to tell me none of the stars are really there?
Well some are there but some burned out ten thousand years ago.
I don’t believe that.
How can you not believe it, it’s a known fact.
But I see them.
You see memories.
-Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
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| Photograph by Mike Bailey-Gates |
Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.
- in Fragile Things
