just a story after all

From the mid-nineteen-fifties I do remember 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with James Mason, Kirk Douglas, Peter Lorre. It may have been my first movie with Mason, whose glower was frightening, intimidating, crazed, more than a touch of insanity. 

Peter Lorre was at his best, and I seem to remember him saying, “Yesss, Professor” in only his way. Peter Lorre, sinister, with the manner of one whom you would not want to spot darting behind a tree, following you on a lonely night. The laboratory assistant Peter Lorre out on some dark mission, possibly to collect a human body part to complete his master's experiment. At any event, Doerr’s book makes me want to see 20,000 Leagues again.

All the Light We Cannot See. For Doerr to epilogue with Marie-Laure and Werner’s daughter or grandson as one wanted to expect all through might not have done at all, might have diminished. Even so, seeing their inevitable crossing, one dares hope, but both life and its stories are poignant, and without wistfulness there is no story. Doerr's writing was so superb that it was another book I did not want to end. Like Spragg, Where Rivers Change Direction. Ebert’s Life Itself: A Memoir. Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees. Others. The Bridges of Madison County when you do not want to see Clint Eastwood’s old pickup truck drive away, much less the ashes poured in the river. A body can get lost in a book. A soul too. And feel lost, displaced when it ends. If life were stories, to go back where or when and never come out.

Light helped me remember that life is mostly within, inside us as much as what we can see, if not more. Loves and memories and relationships. Chance crossings. Pain, sadness and sorrow. Regrets. Light and darkness. Might have beens. Children growing up. Oneself growing up. Gott mit uns but fate confounding God's dream. Feelings that one may have held alone -- or maybe not alone at all, as Marie remembered Werner from so long ago. Saved by love that both saw when they were so young. Finally, the shadows that moved around her in her ancient age.

“... 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 ... slip through your jacket and shirt and breast bone and lungs, ... the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom [life] was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.” I wonder. I do wonder. I just really wonder.

And in its ending, is there any difference in life and stories about life? I really wonder.

T

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Scribner, 2014, p. 529.