Theo of Golden

“Only a year. Not so long. But long enough to create a current of his own and to catch others in it. Without knowing it, a whole cadre—Asher, Tony, Ellen, Basil, dozens of others—was being carried along by the vortex that was Theo. Floating. Sailing. Gathering mass and momentum. Running to an ocean they knew little about at the time. And looking back, all would have said […] ‘our hearts,’ to use the preacher’s words, ‘our hearts burned within us.’”

This passage employs a wealth of water imagery to foreshadow Theo’s transformative impact on Golden’s residents, invoking his established fondness for rivers. The fragmentary sentences—“Floating. Sailing.”—mimic an organic, relaxed flow, while the “vortex” metaphor suggests Theo’s magnetic, inescapable influence. Dramatic irony emerges as the narrative reveals that Theo’s brief presence in Golden will profoundly affect the community.

“The old man’s mind began to spin a fanciful vision: each of the ninety-two frames is a window. Each face depicted in the frames is standing outside the building, peeking in with amusement at the customers on the inside. At night, when the shop is closed, the faces in the portraits leave their frames, step inside the shop, mingle, […] and then return home by opening. He smiled at the colorful, if ludicrous, idea. […] He had the imagination of a poet. But he had, too, the eyes and mind of a connoisseur.”

Theo’s imaginative perspective on the Chalice portraits reveals his empathic ability to see Asher’s subjects as living beings rather than mere art objects. This fantasy sequence employs animation as a literary device, for the image of the portraits coming to life and mingling foreshadows Theo’s determination to bring such an occurrence about in real life by connecting the portraits with their subjects through his bestowals. The passage also celebrates his poet’s imagination, which allows him to look beyond the surface levels of reality.

“No, my dear. Sadness might be many things, but it is rarely stupid. The good sadness, I think, is always trying to tell us something very important.”

Theo’s response to Minnette reframes emotional pain as instructive rather than wasteful, challenging conventional perspectives on negative emotions. By personifying sadness as a sentient entity that is actively “trying to tell us” something important, the