Shortly after laughing at my sister while reading a book, I cried for 2 hours reading the last 10% of All the Light That We Cannot See. On a plane. Sniffling. Wiping tears off with my sleeve and not giving a damn what the fellow next to me thought.
War brings out the foulest of human nature’s ugliness, and the brightest of its beauty. Even in times of relative peace, we are fascinated with the idea of war. What happened. When. How. Why. Hundreds and thousands of books, movies, documentaries, doctoral dissertations, museum exhibits, national memorials. They say that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. It’s funny that while we are not wired to comprehend and empathize with 1000 tragedies, we are perfectly capable of creating 1000 times more than that.
This book is a small collection of stories, of people’s lives fatefully linked by war. There are no heroes, and no villains. Like Marie-Laure so wisely explains to Werner: “when I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, 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?” People made choices, even when it seemed like they had no control of their lives, and the story is a culmination of those choices.
In the grand scheme of things their choices seemed to have mattered little. People still died, fair or not. Murderers still went free, just or not.
It is only during war that you are encouraged to die. Die for your country, for your faith, for justice, for revenge. Of course, the better choice would be to cause someone else to die, for your country, your faith, your people. I was watching Fury the other day, and half the movie consisted of people being mauled down as if they were stalks of corn. All those bodies, rows and rows of them, became the statistic that sang of the heroes’ gallantry. Yet you could tell a beautiful tragedy with each one of them. It seems to be a much more courageous feat to trudge on with your life until it simmers to an unremarkable end than to have it end abruptly with an exclamation mark.
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