p. 450

“To hold it in a barrel, S. imagines, is to imprison the vital; to cellar that barrel is to warehouse the sublime.”

S realizes what the black wine represents. Several meanings of this phrase can be deduced. Perhaps Straka is communicating that the wine that is being stored in this cellar for all these years represents the lives and accomplishments of people that could never happen because of the tortures and murders that occured. In the same respect, creating more of Vevoda’s wine represents creating more destruction and death, forever capturing the wonderful things that people could have accomplished if they weren’t killed. S believes that launching a Black Vine on a civilization means taking “all the churning fury of the lost and use it to render other people, in some other place, equally lost.” Using a Black Vine means erasing the history and traditions of the civilizations that are destroyed.

A puzzling phenomenon occurs. S kneels towards a puddle of black wine on the floor that is leaking from an unlabeled barrel. Immediately, the voices in his head go silent. The voices have “re-absorbed into the ground on which we walk,” he thinks. Suddenly, S has an epiphany. It is important of write down the stories of the lands he visited, such as “Prague, Cape Town, the Winter City,” he realizes, because these civilizations can be erased so easily, and their stories on paper is the only way to truly preserve them.