All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

He drags open the cellar door and pauses a moment, vision swimming. “This is it?” he asks. “They’re really coming?”

But who is there to answer?

In stormy light, its granite glows blue. At the highest tides, the sea creeps into basements at the very center of town. At the lowest tides, the barnacled ribs of a thousand shipwrecks stick out above the sea.

Water, thinks Werner. I forgot water.

The Goddess of History looked down to earth. Only through the hottest fires can purification be achieved.

“Frau Elena, does a bee know it’s going to die if it stings somebody?”

the economic collapse of Germany looming over them like the severe geometry of the mills.

The despair doesn’t last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient.

Nothing he’s encountered before has made so much sense.

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which

Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever,

Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”

The air swarms with so much that is invisible!

It seems true: nothing changes but the day of the week.

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe… The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.

Everything as before. But nothing is as before.

There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.

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

And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.

“But he died.” “And I did not.” This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear.

You would like Frederick I think. He sees what other people don’t.

They always seem to be going somewhere and never doubt that it is the right place to be going. Something his own country has lacked.

and Marie-Laure endures the slow rain of hours by running her fingers over his seashells down in his study, ordering them by size, by species, by morphology,

atavistic

There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong.

That he never quite understood the rules. All those Parisian mothers pushing buggies through the Jardin des Plantes or holding up cardigans in department stores—it seemed to him that those women nodded to each other as they passed, as though each possessed some secret knowledge that he did not. How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

Ashes, ashes: snow in August. The shelling resumed sporadically after breakfast, and now, around six P.M., has ceased. A machine gun fires somewhere, a sound like a chain of beads passing through fingers.

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