All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

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

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

“But was it decent to leave him out there like that? Even after he was dead?” “Decency does not matter to them.”

wondering who will cave, who will tattle, who will be the bravest. Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.

Volkheimer looks down at him with great tenderness. “What you could be,” he says.

“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”

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

It seems as likely to Marie-Laure that the people just disappear. The soldiers throw a bag over whomever they want to remove, run electricity through him, and then that person is gone, vanished.

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.

Marie-Laure is reminded that her great-uncle was not always so fearful, that he had a life before this war and before the last one too; that he was once a young man who dwelled in the world and loved it as she does.

Though perhaps what has changed are the eyes that see it.

They sleep despite noise, despite cold, despite hunger, as though desperate to stay removed from the waking world for as long as possible.

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.

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

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

God’s truth? How long do these intolerable moments last for God? A trillionth of a second? The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness. That’s God’s truth.

None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life.

Once she sees a row of three children facedown, backpacks on their backs. Her first thought is: Wake up. Go to school. Then she thinks: There could be food in those packs.

Jutta hears that grandmothers are rubbing granddaughters with feces, sawing off their hair with bread knives, anything to make them less appealing to the Russians. She hears mothers are drowning daughters. She hears you can smell the blood on them from a mile away.

Sometimes she looks at the eyes of her older colleagues and wonders what they did when the electricity was out, when there were no candles, when the rain came through the ceiling. What they saw.

He sees what other people don’t. What the war did to dreamers.

“We all grew up before we were grown up.

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.