All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if toward the lips of God. And when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.

One winter day in 2004, I took a train from Princeton, New Jersey to New York City. The gentleman in the seat in front of me was talking on his cellphone about the sequel to The Matrix, and we were racing along at 40 or 50 miles per hour, and as the train dove beneath the Hudson River, his call dropped. And the man got angry. He swore, rapped his phone with his knuckles, and I thought: What he’s forgetting—what we’re all forgetting, pretty much every time we expect our mobile phones to function—is that what he’s doing is a miracle. He’s using two minuscule radios crammed inside a little slab of glass and aluminum to send and receive little packets of invisible light between hundreds of towers, one after the next, miles apart, each connecting to the next at the speed of light, and he’s using that magic to have a conversation about Keanu Reeves! I thought: Because we’re so habitualized to it, we’ve stopped seeing the grandeur of this breathtaking act. The magic of it has vanished. So that day on the train I scribbled a phrase into my notebook—“All the Light We Cannot See”—and started wondering how I might tell a story that could help us feel and see again the power (and sorcery) of using light to carry human voices across distances, over borders, and through walls.

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

As a kid I took for granted that the history taught in school was the one and only truth. But as I get older, I began to see that history is a story continually shaped and reshaped by people with power. In my research for All the Light, I learned that as early as 1932, Joseph Goebbels, the soon-to-be Minister for Propaganda for Hitler’s Reich, was grasping the immense potential of radio for controlling narratives. Generally speaking, wireless sets were too expensive for most people in the depressed Germany in which Hitler came to power, so his new government worked with manufacturers to mass-produce substantially cheaper radios called People’s Receivers. By 1938, Goebbels announced that he’d added 5.5 million new listeners in the five years since the National Socialists had come to power, and that he’d soon reach his goal of placing a radio in every German home. (See 1938 NYT article here: nyti.ms/2ndwzMV) I hope that as readers read these sections, they might consider ways technologies are being used now, in the 21st century. How can the tools of digital media be used to misrepresent, distort, and amplify the truth?

Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key.

As a parent, I’m continually trying (and failing) to beat back the flames of my anxiety with logic. This airplane’s bouncing around like mad, I tell myself, but how many planes actually crash from turbulence? My kid has a fever, but it’s just a fever, and everyone gets fevers from time to time, right? As the German invasion rolls into Paris, Marie-Laure’s father is under an overwhelming amount of stress, and like many of us, he tries to subdue his terror with rationality. His daughter is depending on him for her safety and it’s paramount that he doesn’t let his own fear engulf him.

This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

Can you imagine the trauma and stress of trying to sleep or eat or relieve yourself after dark in those abominable trenches of the First World War? While those flares slowly descended overhead? Knowing snipers were out there searching for you in their telescopic sights? From a larger point of view, I hoped Etienne’s remembered terror here would function as a parallel to Marie-Laure’s—and all of our—worst fear. Are we brave enough to accept the fact that eventually death will find us all, and to do what we can to improve the world before it does? This is a question I wrestle with in all my writing, I think, and perhaps especially in my new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land: the courage it takes to be a steward, and the seemingly ordinary people who summon that courage. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56783258-cloud-cuckoo-land

“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”

A lot of my work plays around with questions of free will. How free are any of us in the face of historical circumstances, socioeconomic class, systemic inequity, etc.? I hoped this conversation might present a moment of reversal for these two boys: in the pages ahead, Werner will come to believe that he can no longer achieve his dreams, and must simply try to survive the machinery of the Reich. Meanwhile, Frederick will act with profound courage and try to reclaim ownership of his life, albeit with tragic consequences. It will take Werner a couple hundred more pages to absorb the lesson Frederick’s bravery teaches him and try to reclaim possession of his own fate.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

This line was and continues to be a reminder to myself of how brief our lives are, and how incredibly lucky we are to be here on this planet. Every hour we can go out and move unencumbered through the world is so incredibly precious. See things, I remind myself, learn things, investigate things—chase your curiosities while you still can!

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

I wondered what it would be like, particularly for a sightless person, to lose the sounds of the church bells marking your hours. Having Marie lose track of time seemed an efficient way to dramatize her extreme vulnerability and isolation at this moment. Time, of course, is a construct of human culture—hours and minutes are a totally arbitrary way to divide up a day. But the divisions of time provide so much comfort and routine: when it’s six o’clock for me in Idaho, and eight o’clock for you in Toronto, we are connected by a shared cultural agreement. When those comforts go away, what happens to us?

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

In pretty much all of my fiction, and especially in Cloud Cuckoo Land, I like to tinker around with scale, with things-inside-things. A story (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) inside of another story (All the Light); a scale model of Saint-Malo inside the actual town of Saint-Malo; a diamond inside a little house inside a larger house; a story inside of a brain. On the scales of bacteria we are inconceivably large, but on the scales of the universe we are inconceivably small--and yet certain patterns persist at the most microscopic and macroscopic levels. Those resonances across scales are so fascinating and beautiful. For me, there’s something particularly miraculous about reading and writing that reminds me of this: what is a novel, after all, but a little self-contained universe, full of microscale and macroscale patterns, that you get to carry around in your hands?

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

Since I play a lot in All the Light with what’s visible and not visible—and since I’ve made my poor reader wait 466 pages for the two protagonists to be in the same room together!—this seemed an apt time to try a crazy burst of sentences like this. I find it astonishing that every person I have ever known—along with pretty much all other living organisms—started as something too small to be seen with the naked eye. As the great physician Siddhartha Mukherjee reminds us, all reproduction depends upon collapsing every mind-blowing system that composes a living being down to a single cell, then building it back up again. Isn’t that astonishing?

And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

I am often asked about this passage. Is it an argument for an afterlife? Does it invoke the millions of human beings murdered in the Holocaust? Is this a description of memory, flying about invisibly between us, like electromagnetic communication? What does it mean now, in 2021, that the last few people who can remember the Second World War are passing away? What does it mean that national borders over which millions died are now crossed by thousands of cars and trucks every minute? And how important is it that we try to keep remembering the lives of the ones who have come before us, and keep lofting their stories up into the air around us, so that they might continue to live? What’s important to me is not to offer any definitive answers, but only to pose the questions, to say to myself and to the reader: you are just a part of a vast continuum of lives and souls, and what are you going to do with the short time you have while you are here?