All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

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?