Everything Beautiful Began After Read Online Free PDF

reality was probably that his father was happier without them, and if he had a son in Saudi Arabia where his oil company was based, then he was probably more intelligent, more handsome, and a bit taller than George. The truth about his father would have to wait until he showed up several years later.
    George decided on Athens long before he actually went. It was a city he felt he knew intimately through the many texts he had translated.
    As he neared graduation from Exmouth, George told his mother in a letter home how he planned to do his college degree in two years and then move to Athens to embark upon life as an archaeological linguist. George argued that archaeologists help modern cultures through what they expose with their excavations. He gave examples. Israel’s unwelcoming Negev Desert—a place where archaeologists uncovered the method by which the ancient Nabataean people had irrigated the land for crops two thousand years ago using the rain from cloudbursts through a system of irrigation channels and water cisterns. After this technology was relearned, life quickly returned to a place modern residents had found was beyond any type of cultivation.
    Even more miraculous, George wrote in another letter, was how—after years of failed agricultural efforts four thousand meters up, in a lake region of Peru and Bolivia—archaeologists uncovered a technique that ancients had used to grow crops successfully on about two hundred thousand acres.
    In the few letters his mother wrote back, she never once mentioned any of his historical stories. Instead she told him what she had eaten for breakfast, how the weather had ruined her plans, the state of the house, their lack of money, and that she dreaded her birthday. Once she said she was having minor surgery, and would be unable to write for three months and not to worry about her.
    Between Exmouth and Athens, George went to a small liberal arts college, not far from his school. He lived in the dormitory known as Foxhole. He had a bed, a desk, a chair, a lamp, and a small bookshelf, which was stacked precariously with too many volumes.
    He had a roommate from an island off Maine called Joshua, who wore a clear brace over his teeth and rode a 1950s bicycle.
    On Saturday nights, George copied out whole sections of the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient Greek. After his first English class, George gave the teacher a folder containing a few of his translations. The teacher was very old. He opened the folder, looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, “Jesus of Nazareth.”
    During his freshman year, he stayed up for two days, listening to the Bach partitas over and over without headphones.
    A week later George returned to his dorm to find his roommate’s cupboard empty and his bed stripped to a mattress. A note on George’s pillow said:
Dear George,
I’ve moved! But only a few doors down the hall if you ever need a friend . . .
Joshua B
    George wrapped CDs of Bach’s French Suites into a little package with ribbon. Then he opened a bottle of gin and swigged from it several times before pouring some into a glass and mixing it with tonic water.
    Then he took out a pad of paper and a pen.
    He looked at his drink and then out the window—at the gently blowing tall trees that were all over campus. Then George carried the package down the hall and left it outside Joshua’s new door with a note that read:
When Johann Sebastian Bach was nine years old, he copied out an entire library of music. He sneaked out of his bedroom, went downstairs, quietly turned the metal circle that lifted the latch and worked quickly in a blaze of moonlight. The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.
G.
    A few nights after making love to Rebecca, George relived the experience in a café close to his apartment. He tried to remember every detail, things she said, what they had for dinner. He wanted a photograph of her or a lock of hair, some physical token to remind him of the