“The noble man sets aside what he does not understand. If concepts are not correct, words do not correspond to reality; if words do not correspond to reality, deeds cannot be accomplished.” Confucius

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The narrating child immerses itself in the lily ponds of magical thinking. It attaches lofty expectations to its own imaginings. The tangible gains of adulthood strike it as absurdly meager.

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“Do not try to fight a puma if you're not one yourself.” Linford Christie

*
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke

Alisa

Barefoot, bronzed, and baring her midriff, Sina let out a provocatively loud laugh and leaned over the improvised buffet as though she wanted to present her backside to the entire gathering. She stripped a piece of fruit from a skewer and licked her fingers. Alisa watched her with a mixture of amusement and disapproval.

“Cute, the way you eat,” she said venomously. “Like a child with an appetite for applause.”

Sina grinned down into her cleavage.

“You’re just annoyed because you know Virgil enjoys talking to me, even though everyone knows I have so little to say.”

The air shimmered. Someone turned the music up. Children shrieked. Alisa sipped a non-alcoholic drink, like most of the women attending the farm-shop festival. For a moment she surrendered to a summery thoughtlessness.

Through some incomprehensible process of collective affection and swarm intelligence, Sina’s backyard shop had become the most beloved nucleus of coziness for miles around. Years ago, someone had installed the pergola, the rose arch, and a fence, covering the latticework with climbing hydrangea and enhancing it with a continuously blooming climbing rose. By now, blue morning glories, black-eyed Susans (Thunbergia alata), and nasturtiums dramatized the arrangement. The setting served as the backdrop to temporarily settled domestic lives, complete with sandbox, bouncy castle, swing, changing table, and stroller parking.

String lights hummed to life. Evening again. The arrangement reminded Alisa of electric fireflies. She stepped beneath the vines, smartphone in hand. The display glimmered. She surveyed the field of seduction. For an instant, the people blurred into a crowded tableau. Alisa hallucinated spirals and iridescent patterns. She conjured rotations of desire, the perpetual game of imitation, deception, and triumph.

In Sina’s kitchen, Diana and Malia were rivals. They wore little more than the bare essentials in the eternal summer. The master of the house sat on the windowsill as though he had not been invited. Nevertheless, he kept track of everything. The most successful members of their generation had long since produced two children and still had their first husband. Physical decline disguised itself as nonchalance, and skirts grew shorter with every year past thirty. Thirty-two-year-olds tightened the mesh of their nets and no longer threw every grumbling dwarf gourami, pea puffer, or blood tetra straight back into the gutter puddle.

They studied the hierarchies in the districts governed by their favorite Italian and Greek restaurants. They flirted with the staff, dutifully playing their part in waiters’ comedies. They were ready for bit parts and broad farce. Their husbands arrived late; families and friends wandered the glowing-hot streets in the evenings. They toasted one another outside Jonna’s child-friendly pub or met for wine in the family-friendly beer garden of the esoteric Halif. Or they encountered one another beside the picturesque piss gutter of Grete’s Schwarzburg Eighty-Two.

Malia

The Lords of Loss represented Waldeck interests, even in times of feud. Yet they were unwilling to rebel against a Landgrave of Hesse. In 1408, Johann von Loss opened Lower Loss Castle to Hermann II of Hesse as a refuge in a time of severe distress. In gratitude, he received Ederthal as a fief and also Neukirchen Castle, which has been haunted ever since. Gerda von Loss was the last Mother Superior of the Augustinian convent in Fritzlar, closed in 1530 because of the Reformation.

Malia meditated in the familiar dōjō where the echoes of commands, admonitions, and encouragements still seemed to linger in the air. Another person would surely have heard nothing in the silence, with its rainbow-colored spirals of dust, but for Malia the room itself was an experience. Here she had learned discipline and understood that her grasp of profound transformation was insufficient. All her life she had searched for a path, and now she had arrived upon her path, the one Agravain had traced before her. The combination of pleasure and learning acted like a driving force.

This was not merely a place of discipline but a sanctuary where Malia found herself again and again. Suddenly she felt an awakening within her unlike anything she had ever known. The universe opened before her in a haze of perception.

For the first time, Malia experienced a sensation that dissolved all boundaries and culminated in a single overwhelming explosion of universal unity. In a moment when time and space lost their familiar forms, she felt liberated. A feeling of pure being overcame her. She too had been blessed with beauty and endowed with the capacity for absolute insight. This spiritual awakening—experienced also as an inner flame shooting upward—vanished almost immediately. Yet the memory of the illumination continued to burn within the sensual, unceasing fire that Malia felt in her master’s presence. Was this the mystical energy released in a cosmic eruption, the one that had already been discussed during their walks? It seemed to Malia as though her physical passion had cleared the way for an invitation to acknowledge, free of fear and doubt, the infinity of her own essence.