All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

Even those who have returned, she can tell, have returned different, older than they should be, as though they have been on another planet where years pass more quickly.

She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history.

It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is. A town on the northern coast of France? Love? Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right.

Over time, thinks Marie-Laure, events that seem jumbled either become more confusing or gradually settle into place. The boy saved her life three times over. Once by not exposing Etienne when he should have. Twice by taking that sergeant major out of the way. Three times by helping her out of the city.

It’s the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It’s that the sod seals them over.

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

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.