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It was not safe to spend time looking back.

In one ecstatic memory he had ridden a gleaming brown horse across a field that smelled of damp grass, and had dismounted beside a small stream from which both he and the horse drank cold, clear water. Now he understood about animals; and in the moment that the horse turned from the stream and nudged Jonas's shoulder affectionately with its head, he perceived the bonds between animal and human.

Jonas did not want to go back. He did not want the memories, didn't want the honor, didn't want the wisdom, didn't want the pain. He wanted his childhood again, his scraped knees and ball games. He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden. But the choice was not his. He returned each day to the Annex room.

He had walked through woods, and sat at night beside a campfire. Although he had through the memories learned about the pain of loss and loneliness, now he gained, too, an understanding of solitude and its joy.

It was a game he had often played with the other children, a game of good guys and bad guys, a harmless pasttime that used up their contained energy and ended only when they all lay posed in freakish postures on the round. He had never recognized it before as a game of war.

Things could change, Gabe," Jonas went on. "Things could be different. I don't know how, but there must be some way for things to be different.

But now Jonas had experienced real sadness. He had felt grief. He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those.

Overwhelmed by pain, he lay there in the fearsome stench for hours, listened to the men and animals die, and learned what warfare meant.

The agony of the fractured leg began to seem no more than a mild discomfort as The Giver led Jonas firmly, little by little, in the deep and terrible suffering of the past.

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

He now suspected that every human being who knew how high-frequency traders made money was making too much money doing it to stop and explain what was going on.

The Old were always given the highest respect.