The first time I drive across the desert and into the Rio Grande valley, I swim into blue. The sky is as sharp and vast as I’ve ever seen it—blue so expansive and pure it hurts my eyes. 

In her beloved novel set in Santa Fe, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather puts it this way: “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.” 

Perhaps it’s this peculiar sense of openness, how the sky feels like it might at any moment swallow you whole, that makes Santa Fe feel like a natural home to seekers and pilgrims. In my case, I’ve come to Santa Fe in late summer for a ten-day writer’s residency, hoping I’ll find myself, or God, or at least a really good idea for a poem. 

I drive up a winding mountain road and turn right into the college campus where I’ll be staying. When I climb out of my car and stretch my legs, the air is heavy with oncoming rain. There’s no air conditioning in my room, so I crack the windows for airflow all day and most of the night. Later, when I leave a bag of dried mangoes open on the shelf above my makeshift desk, my room will pulse with the scent, despite the open windows. The air in Santa Fe is more porous somehow. It carries more on its currents.

During my first days there, I’m not sure how to find what it is I’m looking for, precisely. So in between workshops and classes, I take to the hiking path near campus. It starts out flat, a dirt path etching through sagebrush and cacti. Then it descends down into the arroyo, a dried-out river bed filled now with desert plants and old stones. I set out knowing the daily thunderstorms will come as soon as I’m too far away to turn back. I head out anyway. 

Anthony Doerr’s ambitious novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, is a book about books. Doerr says so himself in the Author’s Note at the end, dedicating the novel to the writers—and keepers—of stories that buoy humanity through the ages.  But Cloud Cuckoo Land is also a book about longing, about pilgrimage, and about the homesickness many of us carry, often for a place we’ve never been. 

The plot follows the lives of five main characters, set in three timelines spanning from medieval Constantinople to a post-apocalyptic mission to space. We know, from early on, that an ancient text will play a key role in each of the characters’ lives. But what we discover, as we read further, is the particular longings each character possesses for a place both distant and different from their own. 

The ancient text (invented by Doerr though believable as a discovered work by Diogenes) follows this same plotline of longing: protagonist Aethon embarks on a winding and agonizing journey to become a bird so he can fly to a utopia in the sky, called, of course, Cloud Cuckoo Land. 

Doerr specializes in the weaving of disparate stories together, uniting them with humanizing themes, despite unrecognizable circumstances. And while the text itself is what eventually becomes the thread linking these five characters through the centuries, the text really represents, by nature of its plot, an inescapable sense of longing that seems inherent to being human. 

The first character we meet is a girl situated farthest into the future: Konstance, aboard the Argos mission to space to save humanity. Passengers aboard the ship hurtle away from Earth toward Beta-Oph2, where humanity will supposedly find a safe haven. But eventually, Konstance chafes against their future home; instead, she starts looking back, studying virtually augmented renderings of Earth and learning its cities and landscapes by heart. Soon, her longing for a home she never knew, uncovers the startling truth of where they’re actually headed. 

The reader spends the most time with Zeno, an old war veteran set in the present who never seized his chance to tell the man he loved how he felt. His story is one of missed opportunities for agency in his own life. But when one road after another becomes a dead-end, he fixates his longing on a singular task: translating Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land into English. He spends hours at his town’s local library deciphering partially obscured lines and bringing them into his language. The novel’s climactic scene takes place in the same library, where he leads a group of young children to perform his translation as a play.

Anna and Omeir both live in medieval times near Constantinople: Anna, in the middle of a dying city, longing for transport out, and Omeir, in the country until he’s called into the emperor’s army destined to siege Constantinople. Throughout their storylines, Anna longs for a way out, while Omeir longs for a way back. 

And then there’s Seymour, a loveable but flawed young boy set in Zeno’s timeline. He seems to have sensory processing disorder, and he copes by fleeing to the woods behind his house—until a development company tears it down to put in a slew of vacation homes. He’s poor, isolated, and eventually becomes the perfect prey for a radicalized environmentalist group that nudges him toward violence. His longing, mostly, is for the way things used to be—for a forest he can’t reconstruct—as well as for a place he might belong among a group of radicals who, the reader knows, is really a thinly constructed sham. 

All of these stories are anchored by Aethon’s trajectory toward Cloud Cuckoo Land—excerpts from the ancient text start every section of the book and set the tone for the characters’ journey ahead. Aethon’s journey takes him across the countryside as a donkey, into the depths of the ocean as a fish, and finally into the sky as a crow. His path is Odyssean, stunted and stilted at every turn by hardship and fueled by determination to find the paradise he’s been longing for:

“All my life I have longed to see more, to fill my eyes with new things, to get beyond this muddy, stinking town, these forever bleating sheep. … I have heard of a city in the clouds where thrushes fly into your mouth fully cooked and wine runs in channels in the streets and warm breezes always blow.”

…

“It’s no better out there, Aethon, I promise you,” said the crone. “…Here you have cheese, wine, your friends, and your flock. What you already have is better than what you seek.” 

(From Section Three, Cloud Cuckoo Land)

For Aethon, a truer life waits for him in the clouds; he sees only banality in his life as it is. In this passage, I glimpse my own restlessness. I, too, long to fill my eyes with new things, to flee the ordinary in pursuit of the extraordinary. 

For most of my life, my propensity to seek the numinous has left me with feelings of being misunderstood, a stranger in the world I inhabit. I always felt like I wanted more than other people—like my spirit was an insect’s antenna, constantly probing the air for passage into another reality. 

But in Santa Fe, a trip up to the Sangre de Cristo range or the Old Town plaza leave me with the sense that seeking is a primary way of being. Everyone’s looking for something different, something transcendent. Take the St. Francis cathedral: it’s majestic, other-worldly, the city’s functional heart to which all roads lead. There’s the miraculous staircase in Loretto Chapel, whose origins are the stuff of prayer and miracle. Everywhere, there’s evidence of old superstitions and suggestions for sacred healings; you can pick up palo santo or sage or incense in even the most commercial gift shop. 

Then there’s the landscape, with all its extremes. I don’t know if it’s the painfully blue sky, the silvery sagebrush along winding dirt paths, or the way the weather changes moods on a dime, but the entire place seems to have brushed elbows with the divine. New Mexico’s state slogan is “The Land of Enchantment;” it doesn’t take long within its borders to understand why. 

Every day in Santa Fe I walk the same arroyo in search of something, thinking the landscape’s legends will rub off on me. I voice half-formed questions to God or the Universe, hoping for a response: insight dropped into my brain like pebbles into water. I want otherness—to be transported to a world more enchanted than my own. 

Mostly, I find lizards and rain. 

There are plenty of benefits, in my view, to occupying a state of longing. In my own life, that “homesickness we could never shake off,” as Rilke puts it, has functioned as a compass, pointing toward a better future—a nod to how things should be. 

I want things to be better, to be different, to be whole. I want the environment to return to health, for racial reparations to be made and equity established, for income disparity to be abolished, for people, in general, to feel happy and loved (myself included). On a less noble level, I want to feel like the world is more magical than it often is. I want to be yanked out of daily life and awed awake. I want miracles. 

I can’t shake those desires. And while it’s frustrating to have one eye fixed on how things could be, longing has the capacity to operate as the engine of hope. Its message, it seems, is this: It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Besides, if I know, deep down, that things could be better, then maybe I’m a little more determined to set about actually making things better, however and wherever I can. 

So why not keep longing for my own version of Cuckoo Land—a magical, restored place I hope exists?

The trap, of course, is this: if I’m fixated on some utopian version of society or some hyper-spiritualized reality, I’m in danger of missing what’s already in front of me. Life is, for better or worse, full of contradictions, and full of ordinariness. I can’t take in the bliss of a winter sunrise without also remembering my fellow humans down the street who slept in the bitter cold, or without shivering to the point of exhaustion. I can’t experience visceral, life-altering love for my child without enduring day after repetitive day, the endless replenishing of snacks, changing of diapers, and fights with sleep. 

The place I desire—the magical land, absent of complication and mundanity—does not exist. 

If Doerr is telling us anything in the novel, beyond the power of stories to unite humanity, perhaps it relates to the universality of desire and longing in the human experience. Across centuries, and in widely varied circumstances, every character dreams of things being different and better: either in a figurative future or a distant past. 

Aethon arrives after what feels like years of dead ends in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He will, it seems, find everything he’s hoped for. But as he explores paradise, he can think only of home.

“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, where the cities teemed and the herds, wild and tame, drifted like dust across the plains, I wondered about my friends, and my little bed, and the ewes I’d left behind in the field. I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, and yet…” 

(From Section Eighteen, Cloud Cuckoo Land)

Aethon eventually realizes that utopia was never what he wanted. What he really wanted was life: full of contradictions, painful and joyful. So he returns to earth, altered by his journey most markedly in the way he now sees and attends to both the beauty and sorrow of the world he already knew. 

(It’s worth noting here that the novel leaves this conclusion of Aethon’s journey a bit ambiguous; Zeno’s cast of children recreating the translated text are the ones who ultimately rewrite the ending, claiming that Aethon couldn’t have stayed in Cuckoo Land forever; he must have returned home.)

While not every character comes to the exact same conclusion (many do not return home in the way Aethon does), each faces a choice: continue longing for what will always feel just out of reach, or embrace the world around you for what it is—imperfect, sometimes horrible, and also somehow beautiful. 

Every character must reach their own realization of the truth Zeno’s cast writes into Aethon’s journey: “The world as it is is enough.” 

So then, no miracle or revelation for me in Santa Fe. Here’s what I do receive:

A glimpse of the aspens, not swaying or arcing in the wind but barely shimmying, with leaves the size of half dollars in a shade of green so pale you could mistake them for silver coins from far away. From my view, the whole landscape flutters like this, though the breeze remains imperceptible.

Lining the dirt path are endless sage shrubs in that same silvery green.  The smell is everywhere—wood, earth, mint. I can almost detect it on my skin when I get back from my walks, my shirt wet with rain and sweat. 

When the storms roll in, they do so all at once. The sky is clear, then suddenly not. Everything takes on shades of dark blue, and when the thunder rumbles, I can hear it approaching fast. Raindrops slap onto aspen leaves behind me, small and quick like amplified champagne bubbles bursting. Then the cloud is over my head, and my skin slicks wet, not quite soaked. The rain is sudden, gone as quickly as it comes. 

The dust of the desert is washed back down to the arroyo, and all around the greens and purples shine fresh. 

When I arrive back home after ten days away, I feel a deep, welling sense of gratitude for my street, my house, my blue front porch, and the pink crape myrtle I planted beside it. I hug my husband and my dog, embarrassing tears of joy spilling from my eyes. I am not changed by some mystical enlightenment; I have no revelatory moment to speak of. And here, there is still a coat of dust over our baseboards, and dishes to be washed, and work to be done. I’m back in my real life. But, for the first time in a while, I see all of it as something worth attending to and embracing.

For now, it is enough.