All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

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

Yet now there is music. As if, inside Werner’s head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life.

Is not the flame of a new faith rising from this sacrificial readiness?

Far better, he decides, to keep one’s presence small, inconspicuous.

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

“You know how diamonds—how all crystals—grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each atop the next. Millennia after millennia. That’s how stories accumulate too.

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is.

Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest.

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

“Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”

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.

This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

Foucault’s pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Panthéon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died. Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth into the floor.

Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”

“Decency does not matter to them.”

At least, out on the beaches, her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light.

We are a volley of bullets, sing the newest cadets, we are cannonballs. We are the tip of the sword.

It’s not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it’s a system. How do you fight a system?” “You try.”

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”

isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye—the body can never be pure.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

A scientist’s work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.

But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”

to see her is to believe once more that goodness, more than anything else, is what lasts.

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

chair. 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.