All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

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?