Page 83 - Writes of Passage

from THE AMBER SPYGLASS
“Will, I used to come here in my Oxford and sit on this exact same bench whenever I wanted to be alone, just me and Pan. What I thought was that if you – maybe just once a year – if we could come here at the same time, just for an hour or something, then we could pretend we were close again – because we would be close, if you sat here and I sat here in my world—”
“Yes,” he said, “as long as I live, I’ll come back. Wherever I am in the world I’ll come back here—”
“On Midsummer’s Day,” she said. “At midday. As long as I live. As long as Ilive...”
Philip Pullman
This is one of the most memorable moments in Philip Pullman’s celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy, and it comes from the final book in the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. Towards the end of the story, Will and Lyra have – spoiler alert – fallen in love, but they live in parallel universes, and have to be separated. This is their plan for being together when they are apart. Pullman makes us believe in such an extraordinary idea: that what we do in one world could be copied in another, and the copying would be a kind of being together. This passage, and the love between these two characters, have caused the bench in the Botanical Gardens in Oxford to become a place of pilgrimage.
You can find more things to read from Philip Pullman on pages 59 and 70.
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