Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Omeir sits against the wall [...] and he bites back tears. Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the precious one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.”

Omeir is referring to being enlisted in the war, which further grounds the historic aspects of this book by subtly illustrating how boys were taken from their homes to fight in wars they did not understand. Omeir articulates a key problem that all the main characters overcome as they come of age: Change comes at unexpected times and violates expectations. The use of second-person narration is distinct here and is used to address the reader directly with the pronoun “you.”

“The thistles nod their purple crowns and tiny insects sail everywhere. The thousands of pines stacked against the back of the property, rising toward a ridge, seem to breathe as they sway. [...] It’s amazing out here. Big. Alive. Ongoing.”

Seymour is experiencing the depth of the forest behind his home, and this rich description uses metaphor to convey the untouched beauty of the scene. The single word sentences at the end reflect Seymour’s simple conceptualization of the forest, as he is just a child appreciating the forest for the first time. The truncation of his feelings into one word illustrate that he is overwhelmed. The choice of the word “ongoing” foreshadows deforestation on one hand, while also highlighting the interconnectedness of nature.

“Sybil is our guardian, our pilot, our caretaker: she keeps us on course, she keeps us healthy, and she safeguards the heritage of all humanity against erasure and destruction.”

As Mrs. Chen, the Argos’s teacher, explains Sybil to the children when they are first allowed in Vault One, she illustrates their over-reliance on Sybil. Her claim that Sybil protects information from “erasure” is false because, as it is revealed later, Sybil’s database is created by Ilium, which censors information to protect its images of Earth. This contributes to Sybil’s character development because it positions her as “guardian” of the crew.

“Masons and time have left the butt ends of bricks sticking out here and there, so finding holds isn’t difficult, and despite the fear, the rhythm of climbing soon absorbs her. [...] Too little fear and you don’t pay enough attention; too much and you freeze.”

Anna is climbing the priory wall from Himerius’s skiff when she learns this important lesson about fear. Fear, anticipation, and regret are all thematically linked to the coming-of-age plots in this book, and Anna articulates this clearly. Second-person narration is used here to make the claim about balancing fear more widely applicable across the main ideas of this book.

“‘Development,’ [Marian] says, ‘has always been part of the story of this town.’ From a file cabinet in Local History she produces black-and-white prints from a century ago. Six lumbermen stand shoulder to shoulder on the stump of a felled cedar. Fishermen hold yard-long salmon up by their gills. Several hundred beaver pelts hang from a cabin wall.”

Marian is trying to comfort Seymour about the impending deforestation when she discusses the inevitability of real estate development. The photographs show Seymour that development often means harming nature, which relates to the underlying discussions of climate change. The imagery used to describe the photos relates to Seymour’s forest by Arcady Lane: Both situate untouched nature as plentiful, implying that after development, nature will be stripped away.

“The sky is jewel blue and cloudless. Huge white stones lie among weeds like the lost molars of giants. Off to their left, undulating alongside a crowded road for as far as she can see in both directions, runs a derelict stone wall, tufted everywhere with grasses and punctuated every fifty meters or so by a broad, time-battered tower. [...] They said Earth was a ruin.”

As Konstance and Mrs. Flowers go into the Atlas to Istanbul for the first time together, Konstance is shocked that the Earth appears alive. This relates to the theme regarding the spread of knowledge because Konstance has trusted that the Earth is ruined without being shown any direct proof that it is. This stance is complicated by the revelation that Ilium has censored the Atlas later in the book, because perhaps Istanbul has also been censored to appear so alive.

“For Omeir each day offers a new lesson in how careless men can be. Some don’t bother to shoe their bullocks with two-piece shoes; others don’t examine the yokes for cracks and the cracks abrade the backs of the steers [...] There is always blood, always groaning, always distress.”

This quote illustrates Omeir’s deep compassion for animals and furthers his characterization by contrasting his beliefs with those of the other Ottoman troops. Omeir is often presented in opposition to those around him, which highlights how he is treated as an other and views himself as one too. The last sentence does not identify an agent of the bleeding, “groaning,” or “distress”; this ambiguity implies that people and animals are both suffering.

“All her life [Anna] has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she [...] will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that’s the easier thing. But Anna is tired of suffering. And she is not ready to die.”

In the wake of impending invasion, Anna begins to question her beliefs. The parallel sentence structure emphasizes the difficulty Anna experiences in the process of questioning. Her rejection of these ideas illustrates her courage and ability to flout society’s expectations. The Christian ideology she questions highlights the dividing difference between the people of Constantinople, who are Christian, and the Ottomans outside the gates, who are Muslims. The book also breaks down this dichotomy by illustrating that rigid divisions between beliefs do not always reflect the actual beliefs held by individuals.

“I often thought of home, which in my memory no longer seemed a muddy backwater but a paradise, where bees hummed and cattle trotted happily in the fields and my fellow shepherds and I drank wine at sunset beneath the gaze of the evening star.”

In this quote, Aethon speaks in the first person. His reflections about his home illustrate the nostos theme because Aethon now sees the value of his home. This represents an important moment in his plot’s conflict because now he is divided between his desire to find Cloud Cuckoo Land and to return home. Aethon is a donkey at this stage of his story, and as he reflects, he performs the same scene depicted in Anna’s favorite fresco in the tower of the wall, linking Aethon’s story again to the main plots of the book.

“‘In a time […] when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown…’ [Rex] gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. ‘Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible.’”

Rex discusses the importance of nostos in this quote, which is both thematically important and a parallel explanation for how it feels to be a prisoner of war. The belief in possibility is a consistent motivation in each plotline, relating back to Aethon who hopes for a good outcome regardless of his situation. Rex’s discussion of ancient times of difficulty illustrates the ubiquity of struggle across eras.

“Mrs. Flowers was right: the other kids find the Atlas hilariously obsolete. There’s no jumping or tunneling like in the more sophisticated games in the Games Section: all you do is walk. [...] And inside the Atlas everything besides the roads is as immaterial as air: walls, trees, people. The only solid thing is the ground.”

In this quote, Konstance explains the mechanisms of the Atlas. The way that the Atlas functions is an important component of Konstance’s plot, as Seymour’s triggers violate the intended mode of function to signal their existence. Konstance also positions herself in opposition to the other kids, which is a consistent characterization frame for the five main characters. This relates the characters to each other even though they exist in different timelines.

“Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you’re never the same: not quite.”

Konstance laments being trapped alone in Vault One. As part of their coming-of-age stories, each main character must learn that the world is not what they first thought, and that when they experience change, they can never return to their previous states. Her emotional pain is linked to physical injury, showing that the types of change people often endure are not just bodily pain. The repetition in this quote highlights Konstance’s frantic energy and the depth of her disappointment, while the second-person narration renders her feelings more widely applicable.

“Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it’ll end slow. Ours is already ending, it’s just ending too slow for people to notice. We’ve already killed most of the animals, and heated up the oceans, and brought carbon levels in the atmosphere to the highest point in eight hundred thousand years. Even if we stopped everything right now [...] it’ll keep getting hotter for centuries.”

Seymour’s speech to the Environmental Awareness Club highlights his fatalistic worldview. As an anti-hero, Seymour is often pessimistic, but what he says is factually correct. Ultimately, this leads Seymour to radicalization and committing the bombing. Doerr’s depiction of Seymour illustrates that it is important to frame opinions about looming problems like climate change in a way that leads to productive actions to mitigate it, rather than getting mired down in the despair of certain failure like Seymour.

“For a moment Zeno feels that he might be able to speak [a future with Rex] into existence: if he says exactly the right words, right now, like a magic spell, it will happen. I think of you all the time, the veins in your throat, the fuzz on your arms, your eyes, your mouth, I loved you then, I love you now.”

As Zeno imagines what he might say to Rex, his anxiety emerges again. His fixation on saying “the right words” highlights how impossible it is to accomplish his goal, relating to the false utopian theme. When Zeno forms these words in his mind, they come out in a tumble, one phrase after the other, which illustrates how deeply he loves Rex and how incapable he feels of articulating his feelings aloud. The pain of Zeno’s inability to speak his feelings is intensified because he is a gay man in a more repressed era of the 20th century.

“Into her mind swims a vision of another library, a less presuming place, hidden inside the walls of her own skull, a library of just a few dozen shelves, a library of secrets: the library of things Konstance knows but Sybil does not.”

This quote directly relates to the library motif and the theme of preserving knowledge. The metaphor of the mind as a library is an important concept that liberates Konstance from the false conceptualization of Sybil as the vessel of all human knowledge. The imagery of a library within her mind is a powerful way to illustrate that the knowledge of an individual is unique and irreplaceable.

“The world: it’s all he ever loved. The forest behind Arcady Lane, the busy meanderings of ants, the zip and swerve of dragonflies, the rustling of the aspens, the tart sweetness of the first huckleberries of July, the sentinels of the ponderosas, older and more patient than any beings he would ever know, and Trustyfriend the owl on his branch overseeing it all.”

Seymour, though he does not possess the same morals as everyone else in the book, is driven by his love for nature in his efforts to bomb the library. This discussion establishes an emotional link to his character, which eases the reader’s judgment of his wrongdoings. Doerr’s depiction of Seymour and his crimes never collapses the character into simple dichotomies of good and evil, allowing him to be dynamically good and bad simultaneously.

“Behind [Anna] lies slavery and terror and worse. Ahead lies what? Saracens, mountain ranges, ferries where extortionists demand payment for river crossings. [...] There comes a point where the pressure of relentless fear perforates rationality and the body moves independently of the mind. It’s like climbing the wall of the priory: foothold, handhold, up you go.”

As Anna leaves Constantinople, she faces a similar situation as Aethon when he becomes a donkey and is swept off the course of his journey: Neither knows where to go. In times of great stress, Anna surrenders herself to movement over thought, which is a component of her character’s courage. The reference back to the first time she climbed the priory wall establishes the simile between the difficulty of climbing the priory wall and her fleeing of the city.

“Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told [Zeno], there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand.”

This quote illustrates Zeno’s outlook on the translation of lost books, as informed by Rex. The reference to the “fool’s errand” hearkens to Aethon’s tale as a fool’s journey, further muddying the differentiation between the fool’s and hero’s journeys. If a fool’s errand is a task undertaken without adequate knowledge of its validity, Aethon and Zeno are both fools; however, the nobility of the action can render the outcome heroic regardless.

“I had flown so far, I had proven everyone wrong. Yet as I perched on my balcony and peered past the happy flocking birds, over the gates, over the ruffled edges of the clouds, down at the patchwork mud-heap of earth far below, [...] I wondered about my friends.”

In this quote, Aethon acknowledges that he has perhaps not found everything he wanted in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He wonders about his life at home, some may argue, because he is a fool; but, alternatively, he can be understood as compassionate here. This seed of doubt also justifies Zeno and his children’s decision to return Aethon home to Arkadia in their translations.

“Some swivel in Seymour has locked: he can no longer see the planet as anything but dying, and everyone around him complicit in the killing. […] they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it.”

This quote shows Seymour’s radicalization by conveying that he has accepted Bishop’s extreme viewpoint on climate change. The inclusion of “people like his mother” highlights Seymour’s feelings of grievance. The “pyramid scheme” metaphor indicates that Seymour views everyone else as being brainwashed, positioning himself as an enlightened figure who sees things that he thinks others are blind to.

“[Omeir] remembers a tale Grandfather once told about a book left behind by the old gods when they fled the earth. The book, Grandfather said, was locked inside a golden box, which was in turn locked inside a bronze box, then inside an iron box, inside a wooden chest, and the gods placed the chest at the bottom of a lake. [...] But if you could retrieve the book, Grandfather said, and read it, you would understand the languages of the birds in the sky and of the crawling things beneath the ground.”

This quote engages with much of the imagery found in Aethon’s story, including birds, gods, and the notion of a book containing all knowledge. This is an important connection between Aethon’s story and Omeir’s plot because Omeir is not exposed to the story until the latter part of the book. The imagery of the book’s concealment also engages with the themes of gatekeeping knowledge, as this book is hidden from everyone, intentionally locking away the information it contains.

“The underground tomb, the donkey, the sea bass, a crow flapping through the cosmos: it’s a ridiculous tale. But in the version rendered by Zeno and the kids, it’s beautiful too. [...] Seymour feels like he used to when he was caught in the gaze of Trustyfriend, as though he’s being allowed to glimpse an older and undiluted world.”

Seymour’s understanding of Aethon’s story connects it to the fool’s journey interpretation. His “glimpse” into another world relates to the theme of the value of maintaining books because the story grants him access to knowledge that was previously inaccessible to him. He unknowingly comes to the same conclusion about the importance of translation as Zeno and the children, which illustrates the fidelity of their work.

“Dawn takes an hour and she tries not to blink for any of it. First comes a slow spread of purples, then blues, a diversity of hues infinitely more complex and rich than any simulation inside the Library. She stands barefoot in the water, up to her ankles, the low, flat surf moving ceaselessly in a thousand vectors.”

Konstance’s first experience outside the Argos is simple, which highlights Doerr’s view that beauty can be found in simplicity. This links to Aethon’s story as well because Aethon ultimately comes to prefer the simple beauty of his life on earth over the utopia of Cloud Cuckoo Land. The description in this quote uses words to highlight the complexity of what Konstance is seeing, which plays into the underlying discussion regarding her virtual experiences in the library and Atlas: These virtual settings are never enough for Konstance, who values truth and reality over hyper-realistic simulations.