The Giver - Lois Lowry [35]
Jonas glanced around at the astonishing array of volumes. From time to time, now, he could see their colors. With their hours together, his and The Giver's, consumed by conversation and by the transmission of memories, Jonas had not yet opened any of the books. But he read the titles here and there, and knew that they contained all of the knowledge of centuries, and that one day they would belong to him.
"So if I have a spouse, and maybe children, I will have to hide the books from them?"
The Giver nodded. "I wasn't permitted to share the books with my spouse, that's correct. And there are other difficulties, too. You remember the rule that says the new Receiver can't talk about his training?"
Jonas nodded. Of course he remembered. It had turned out, by far, to be the most frustrating of the rules he was required to obey.
"When you become the official Receiver, when we're finished here, you'll be given a whole new set of rules. Those are the rules that I obey. And it won't surprise you that I am forbidden to talk about my work to anyone except the new Receiver. That's you, of course.
"So there will be a whole part of your life which you won't be able to share with a family. It's hard, Jonas. It was hard for me.
"You do understand, don't you, that this is my life? The memories?"
Jonas nodded again, but he was puzzled. Didn't life consist of the things you did each day? There wasn't anything else, really. "I've seen you taking walks," he said.
The Giver sighed. "I walk. I eat at mealtime. And when I am called by the Committee of Elders, I appear before them, to give them counsel and advice."
"Do you advise them often?" Jonas was a little frightened at the thought that one day he would be the one to advise the ruling body.
But The Giver said no. "Rarely. Only when they are faced with something that they have not experienced before. Then they call upon me to use the memories and advise them. But it very seldom happens. Sometimes I wish they'd ask for my wisdom more often—there are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don't want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable—so painless. It's what they've chosen."
"I don't know why they even need a Receiver, then, if they never call upon him," Jonas commented.
"They need me. And you," The Giver said, but didn't explain. "They were reminded of that ten years ago."
"What happened ten years ago?" Jonas asked. "Oh, I know. You tried to train a successor and it failed. Why? Why did that remind them?"
The Giver smiled grimly. "When the new Receiver failed, the memories that she had received were released. They didn't come back to me. They went..."
He paused, and seemed to be struggling with the concept. "I don't know, exactly. They went to the place where memories once existed before Receivers were created. Someplace out there—" He gestured vaguely with his arm. "And then the people had access to them. Apparently that's the way it was, once. Everyone had access to memories.
"It was chaos," he said. "They really suffered for a while. Finally it subsided as the memories were assimilated. But it certainly made them aware of how they need a Receiver to contain all that pain. And knowledge."
"But you have to suffer like that all the time," Jonas pointed out.
The Giver nodded. "And you will. It's my life. It will be yours."
Jonas thought about it, about what it would be like for him. "Along with walking and eating and—" He looked around the walls of books. "Reading? That's it?"
The Giver shook his head. "Those are simply the things that I do. My life is here."
"In this room?"
The Giver shook his head. He put his hands to his own face, to his chest. "No. Here, in my being. Where the memories are."
"My Instructors in science and technology have taught us about how the brain works," Jonas told him eagerly. "It's full of