A real diamond is never perfect. - Anthony Doerr

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

We are mice, he thinks, and the sky swirls with hawks.