Everything is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

Perhaps if I think something is very half-witted, I could tell you, and you could make it whole-witted.

Many cars passed us, which made me feel second rate, especially when the cars were heavy with families, and when they were bicycles.

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

I am the exact inverse of this. I go to bed feeling great and wake up scared and sad every day. 😔

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck.”

If you want to know who protects you from the people that take without asking, it is the police. If you want to know who protects you from the police, it is the people who take without asking. And very often they are the same people.

Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal to be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine.

They are only the best of what exists.

Brod’s life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time.

Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.

In reality she hardly knew him. And he hardly knew her. They knew intimately the aspects of themselves in the other, but never the other.

They reciprocated the great and saving lie—that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things—willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

It’s not her company I need, but to know that she won’t need mine, or that she won’t not need it.

To be truthful, I do not miss Father when he is out so much. He could exist every night with his friends and I would be content.

Love, in your writing, is the immovability of truth.

there are only so many times that you can utter “It does not hurt” before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.

This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

She loved her new vocabulary of simply loving something more than she loved her love for that thing, and the vulnerability that went along with living in the primary world.

He beat her in the kitchen in front of the pots and pans, in the living room in front of their two children, and in the pantry in front of the mirror in which they both watched. She never ran from his fists, but took them, went to them, certain that her bruises were not marks of violence, but violent love.

What is it? she asked, making no effort to keep a safe distance. (There was no such thing as a safe distance, then. Everything was either too close or too far.)

How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much—so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins—without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

There were so many things to attend to—so much gathering and throwing away; and after gathering and throwing away, saving what was salvageable; and after saving what was salvageable, cleaning; and after cleaning, washing down with soapy water; and after washing down with soapy water, dusting; and after dusting, something else; and after something else, something else. So many little things to do. Hundreds of millions of them. Everything in the universe felt like something to do.

Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious—not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

The minutes were unstrung. They fell to the floor and rolled through the house, losing themselves.

I want to inform you about Father, and how I am not being a caricature when I tell you that I would remove him from my life if I was not such a coward. I want to inform you about what it is like to be me, which is a thing that you still do not possess a single whisper of.

I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

“Yes. I would try to.” “You can only say that because you cannot imagine what it is like,” Augustine said. “I can.” “It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.”

It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world.” “But it was not the end of the world,” Grandfather said. “It was. He just did not come.” “Why did he not come?” “This was the lesson we learned from everything that happened—there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us.” “What if it was a challenge of your faith?” I said. “I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.” “What if it was not in His power?” “I could not believe in a God that could not stop what happened.” “What if it was man and not God that did all of this?” “I do not believe in man, either.”

We talked for many minutes, about many things, but in truth I was not listening to him, and he was not listening to me, and I was not listening to myself, and he was not listening to himself. We were on the grass, under the stars, and that is what we were doing.

“She does not desire happiness,” Grandfather said. “The only way she can live is if she is melancholy. She wants us to feel remorseful for her. She wants us to grieve her, not the others.”

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world. It is the subject of extensive scholarly debate whether stillborn babies are subject to the same revelations—if we could say that they have lived without endings. This debate, of course, demands a close examination of that more profound question: Was the world first created or ended? When the Lord our God breathed on the universe, was that a genesis or a revelation? Should we count those seven days forward or backward? How did the apple taste, Adam? And the half a worm you discovered in that sweet and bitter pulp: was that the head or the tail?

We are talking now, Jonathan, together, and not apart. We are with each other, working on the same story, and I am certain that you can also feel it. Do you know that I am the Gypsy girl and you are Safran, and that I am Kolker and you are Brod, and that I am your grandmother and you are Grandfather, and that I am Alex and you are you, and that I am you and you are me? Do you not comprehend that we can bring each other safety and peace? When we were under the stars in Trachimbrod, did you not feel it then? Do not present not-truths to me. Not to me.

It had not occurred to me until he uttered it, but we have a secret. We have a thing amid us that no one else in the world knows, or could know. We have a secret together, and no longer asunder.

A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.

I moved the dust off of the cover. I had never previous witnessed a book similar to it. The writing was on both covers, and when I unclosed it, I saw that the writing was also on the insides of both covers, and, of course, on every page. It was as if there was not sufficient room in the book for the book.

I am a very sad person. I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.)

“I am not a bad person,” he said. “I am a good person who has lived in a bad time.” “I know this,” I said. (Even if you were a bad person, I would still know that you are a good person.)