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.