A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“The next morning, heading off to school, it was at the edge of her yard, where the front walk meets the street, as if it had been waiting for her all night.”

Aubry tells the Holcombes how she became ill, starting with the puzzle ball she found. She explains that she threw the ball into a nearby park only to find it waiting for her in her front yard the following morning. This moment makes clear that the ordinary laws of reality will not always apply in this novel’s fabulist world, while also hinting at the significance of the puzzle ball itself, which represents Aubry’s call to adventure.

“But Aubry was a terror. She might have been the prettiest, but she was also the most stubborn and the most proud. Everything they had—the house, the furniture, the orgy of food on porcelain plates—she took for granted.”

Aubry’s parents view Aubry as a spoiled, selfish, insolent child. Even her sisters believe that her refusal to throw the puzzle ball into the well is a selfish act that leads to the neighbor’s baby’s death. Aubry herself echoes this indictment, believing that she has earned the punishment of her sickness even though she was only a nine-year-old girl at the time. Her guilt over this incident is a vital part of her character, which fuels her to finally give up the puzzle ball in the Himalayas.

“There was no saving her coat or blouse, stained red, but she didn’t care because she was free and running and shedding her sickness behind her. Every step made her breath flow easier, made the pain slip a little farther away. She knew this would be her strategy from now on. She would outrun it. She would stay ahead of this illness and never let it catch her again.”

The first night of Aubry’s sickness, her family doctor attempts to treat her to no avail, and in a fit of intuition, she runs out of the room and into the city. In this moment, without being able to explain why, Aubry understands that she will be able to avoid her sickness as long as she keeps moving. Thus, her long life of enforced travel begins.

“She remembered the days of being proud, now that she was sitting in the mouth of an alleyway, holding out her empty hand to disinterested strangers. She’d once believed that it was possible to control the world, to make it bend to her personal sense of justice. […] Now she knew, without a doubt, that she did not command the world, but was at the mercy of it.”

Aubry reflects on the lessons that she was forced to learn early in her journey. In particular, she quickly relinquishes her selfish and self-centered view of a world that revolves around her and instead realizes that the world is a vast place beyond her knowledge or control. This is an important aspect of her character development and a lesson that she shares with many of the people she meets along the way.

“She sometimes had a thought that the same way this boat bore her across the sea, she was the vessel her disease road around the world. It clung to her back, fingers and toes screwed into her bones, gasping and grinning at all the places she went, a happy demon mounted forever on her shoulders. The thought made her feel used and angry. But everywhere she went, every new sight she saw, she could feel her sickness there, huddling in some dark corner of her mind, clinging to her skull and smiling.”

Aubry imagines that her sickness is a demon torturing her. This contributes to her belief that she is being punished for her selfishness. She retains this belief throughout most of her life, though both Lionel and the Prince call it into question, leading her to new conclusions about the sickness and the purpose of her life.

“The things she has seen in the world, things no one would believe, is a long and extraordinary list. But the library is the most extraordinary of them all. How does she explain it? Is there a way? No. They’ll think she’s mad. She thinks the same, sometimes.”

Aubry reflects on the fantastical things that she has seen as she tries to decide what parts to share with the Holcombes and which things to keep to herself. This passage highlights the inherent mystery of a world that defies explanation and points to The Limits of Scientific Rationalism. She knows that the Holcombes, like most Europeans of the time, will insist on a rational explanation and will call her “mad” when she cannot offer one.

“The point is, punishment is the inability to move, the inability to see the world around you. It’s a universal penalty. What you have is the opposite. You’ve seen so much of the world it must be a reward. For what, I don’t know.”

Aubry has long believed that her enforced travel is a punishment. Here, Lionel suggests that it is in fact the opposite. If confinement is the universal punishment, then a life dedicated to travel must be a gift. Aubry does not believe him at this point, but the idea is echoed later by the Prince, and eventually Aubry accepts that travel and witnessing the world is the purpose of her existence.

“She’d only been wandering the world a few years, and she was still learning ways to survive. This was her, experimenting, using her girlish charms to secure a place to sleep, to eat. She’d never pushed her luck like this before, but here she was, in the thick of it, pushing. She measured every word he said, every look he gave. This is it, she thought. Let’s see how it goes.”

In the flashback about Uzair, Aubry describes a period of youthful experimentation in which she tries different methods of forming, and in some cases forcing, a connection with those she encounters. She believes that this is the only way she can secure safety and shelter while she travels. However, her experience with Uzair teaches her that such manipulation is both wrong and dangerous, and moving forward, she decides to treat others only with kindness and gratitude.

“She’d seen many doctors in Paris, in Rome, in Vienna, but none of them talked like Uzair. None spoke of leaves and herbs. They spoke of needles and knives. None ever though it could all be in her mind—and what a remarkable idea that was—that she had done all this to herself, somehow, that it wasn’t a well, or a punishment for a wish gone wrong—that it was her all along.”

Uzair is the first person to suggest that Aubry’s sickness is not physical but mental and something that she is doing to herself. The novel never entirely disproves this theory, though it is only one of several theories proposed by various characters to explain Aubry’s experience. Over the course of her journey, Aubry comes to understand that her life reflects the world’s own desire to be seen.

“His theories made sense. He was relentless in his pursuit and meticulous as well. These struck her as the best qualities a scientist could have. Let him try, for as long as there is time. He made a ceiling full of stars. He had a monster’s skull in his living room. There seemed to be nothing he couldn’t do.”

Aubry is young and new to her life of travel and its inherent mysteries. She therefore places her trust in Uzair’s intense certainty that science will provide all the answers she requires, despite the many doctors who have already tried and failed to cure her sickness. Uzair’s confidence reflects the 19th-century’s prevailing belief in the supremacy of science and rationality. However, Uzair’s eventual failure calls this supremacy into question.

“‘What is my purpose, Uzair?’

‘Your purpose? You’re looking for a meaning to your life?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘You are here to help me cure you. I wouldn’t be curing you if you weren’t here.’

‘And if you don’t cure me?’

‘Then your purpose is to suffer.’”

Uzair is the first character to raise the question of purpose, suggesting that each person’s purpose in life is different and unique to them. He suggests that Aubry’s purpose is to suffer, which concurs with her own belief that she is being punished and deserves to be. Only after her conversation with the Prince does she realize that the sickness may represent a different purpose entirely.

“Long ago she found love but tasted only sand. She hasn’t looked for love since, not in words, not in gifts, not in candlelight. But tonight, broken down in the prairies, nothing but the wind swaying the grass—of all places, it is here.”

Aubry’s reflection on love underscores the impact that each person can have on those around them, both positive and negative. In this case, Uzair’s cruel treatment has a negative impact on Aubry’s view of love, which she believes to be possessive and dangerous. After her experience with Uzair, she stops looking for love, but she accidentally finds it anyway in the gentle tenderness of Lionel.

“Perhaps her illness is a rejection of the sedentary life, her body rebelling against an inertia that mankind has, over the millennia, eased itself into. […] Wasn’t it deep down inside each and every one of us, the nomadic life, the migratory push? The steppe that smooths the land from Poland to Siberia is made for walking. Wasn’t she just doing what she was meant to do?”

As Aubry prepares to leave Lionel, she considers her sickness with a new and resigned perspective. Her hypothesis that the sickness represents some kind of evolutionary rejection of modern, sedentary life is intriguingly echoed by a statement in a flashback in Chapter 78 when her father says, “[T]hings that never move are only half of what they can be” (329).

“She shuffled to the edge of the well, jaw clenched, breath fast and shallow. What she failed to do at the age of nine, she would do now. All would be forgiven.”

Aubry sees the mysterious wishing well for the second time while she stays with Pathik’s family on the Tibetan Plateau. Still believing that her sickness is a punishment for her failures as a child, she now believes that if she gives up the puzzle ball this time, she will earn forgiveness and be cured. When this proves not to be the case, she feels stunned and defeated, but this disappointment eventually liberates her from the belief that her life is a punishment.

“Was she really so unforgivable? What, exactly, was her crime? What could a nine-year-old schoolgirl have done to end up wandering the world in exile, friendless and miserable and without love? […] The well called her close, not to save her, but to take better aim. Perhaps that is the plan: to neglect her, to watch her heart calcify, to cover her body with wounds so the demon can insert its claws and keep them open forever. Perhaps the goal is madness.”

Struck again with the sickness despite sacrificing her puzzle ball to the well, Aubry now fears that her sins must be even worse than she imagined. She still believes that she is being punished and fears that the sickness will torture her into “madness.” It does not occur to her that throwing the puzzle ball into the well did not work because it was never a punishment to begin with. Learning to accept this is a significant part of her growth by the end of the novel.

“She has lost patience with her body. Tonight, she will beat it senseless. She will bring it to the edge of destruction. Her wish comes just in time. What is eternal will devour all that is temporary. What is Aubry will destroy what is disease. Then, maybe everything that has been closed will open, and she will see the world as she hopes it exists.”

Every time Aubry has found a sense of happiness and love, with Lionel, Pathik, or anyone else, her sickness has forced her to abandon them. Now, for the first time, she refuses to leave, trying to fight against the sickness even if it means death. Ironically, this mirrors what Uzair tried to do to her, though this time, she makes the decision for herself. However, it does not work either way.

“She tells him of that single memorable night when she and Qalima strolled through a sea of green curtains, into rooms adorned with her creations, the night Qalima said, ‘There are things on this earth that only exist because you have beheld them. If you weren’t there, they would never have been.’

The Prince thinks on this and says, ‘The world needs you. […] It wants a witness.’”

The Prince expands on an idea first suggested by Lionel: that Aubry’s life of travel is not a punishment but a gift. The Prince, agreeing with Qalima’s assessment, now takes it one step further to argue that traveling is part of Aubry’s purpose in life. Her role is to bear witness to the wonders of the world. This theory explains The Tension Between Exploration and Rootedness: Aubry’s exile is not a punishment for bad behavior but the inevitable cost of endless exploration.

“‘My life is not a story you can just write up.’

‘But let’s say it is. Let’s say all [sic] we’re all living a story, whether we know it or not. So what do we do? How do we write it? Hmm? Do you want to be a minor character in your own tale? Do you want to be the villain? Do you want to live out a tragedy? A comedy? It’s too easy to steal your meaning away from yourself.’”

It makes sense for Marta to imagine each life as a story because she is a journalist and telling stories is her job. Aubry, by contrast, resists the notion that her life can be reduced to a story. Ironically, she later does precisely that, writing/drawing her story in a book to be left in the infinite library. This moment contributes to a pattern within the novel of stories nested within stories.

“Into the underground passages full of books, past the jungle vines and broad-leafed plants that try and fail to hide the shelves, the shelves that contain the scrolls and parchments and the bowls of split coconuts, all awaiting her company.

‘And it’s a labyrinth. The paths inside have carried me over jungles and under oceans, to places no one has seen but me.’”

For the first and only time, Aubry tells every single facet of her life to Marta, even the true magnitude of the infinite library, making Marta a unique character in the novel, as she is the only one to whom Aubry acknowledges the impossible architecture of the library, which seems to connect across the vast reaches of the globe in ways that defy description.

“‘Do you forgive me?’ her mother asked, but Aubry couldn’t understand the question. Why would her poor mother blame herself when Aubry was the one who left? What kind of history had her mother created in her mind? Would Aubry ever love someone so much that all their tragedies became her own? Instead of answering, she broke down crying, burying her face in her mother’s arms, which was its own kind of answer.”

Aubry experiences many kinds of love in her long life, from the possessiveness of Uzair to the gentleness of Lionel and the single-minded dedication of Marta. Here, Aubry confronts her mother’s love, which contains a depth that she cannot imagine. She believes that she will never love someone the way her mother loves her, and yet her reaction to her mother implies that she already does.

“It comforts her that for every path she’s taken during her many revolutions around the world—for every individual footstep, it seems—there’s a story. Something once happened, a past that is not hers. And this, it turns out, becomes something of an obsession. That there are a billion souls out there, each carving their own paths through the fears and sufferings of the world, a billion peepholes, a billion mirrors, a billion lives that she has not lived, fills her with a curiosity that borders on madness.”

Again, the narrative reinforces the pattern of stories within stories within stories. Aubry now sees that each person’s life is itself a story contained within the story that is the history of the world. She can access them all within the library. Later, she will even contribute her own to the collection. In this way, the novel’s structure reflects its themes.

“Do you see how beautiful it was? None of it existed without you. Your consciousness shone a light on it all.”

The voice of Aubry’s sickness speaks to her again, bragging about the beauty and wonder that it has shown her. It reiterates Qalima’s previous statement that some wonders would not exist if she were not there to see them. This conversation lends credence to the theory that Aubry’s purpose in life is to witness the world.

“Then she is sobbing, overpowered by emotions she cannot explain. It is a sense of relief, as if freed of service. It is a kind of sadness, too, as if watching part of her die. It is the sorrow of loss, and the joy of liberation, and she cannot separate them.”

Aubry confides that she has never been allowed to stay in the same place for so long. When Vincente suggests that she can stop counting the days, implying that her travels are done, Aubry is overcome with emotion. She feels both loss and joy because she has been freed from her life of endless motion, but she has also lost her sense of purpose and motivation in the process.