“Perhaps we were in the roof of the world, where Chaucer had been with his eagle. Perhaps the rush and press of life ended here, the voices collecting in the rafters, repeating themselves into redundancy. Energy cannot be lost only transformed; where do the words go?” (52).
This passage comes after the narrator and Louise have climbed up seemingly never-ending stairs to a “high wild room” (51) where the narrator hears children’s voices from below. The reference to Chaucer might at first be alienating, but even a reader unfamiliar with his work can grasp the idea that this “roof” extends across not only space but time as well, so old that Chaucer himself inhabited it. The narrator continues to paint this space as all encompassing through the (seemingly) contrasting ideas of “ending” and “repeating.” On the one hand, they ruminate that this is the space where all life ends, as if everything becomes trapped here. But the following focus on “repeating” and “redundancy” signifies that the narrator’s notion of “ending” is atypical. For them, “ending” refers to, for example, “voices collecting in the rafters,” rather than voices disappearing completely. To end is not to cease existing, but to stop ascending any further in space—to end is to stop progressing, to go in circles ad infinitum.
The line “energy cannot be lost only transformed” echoes this alternate idea of ending. Nothing in the world actually dissipates; things merely shift, collect, and repeat. Although the narrator was rooted in an actual physical space, the repetition of the word “perhaps” suggests we are now deep in the narrator’s headspace, and that these themes of “redundancy” and “repetition” extend beyond this room and this moment. As the rest of the novel has shown, the narrator often feels trapped in cycles they are complicit in perpetuating. The thought of transformation can be freeing but like a “roof” it is also limiting and even frightening, because (ironically) the narrator cannot see an end point—they do not know where to direct their energy, and seems anxious about the thought of words being out of their control.