Antony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

.....the stone was the largest raw diamond anyone had ever seen. Thei most gifted stonecutter spent eighty days faceting it, and when it was done, it was a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas, but it had a touch of red at it's center, like flames inside a drop of water.... The stone came to be known as the Sea of Flames. Some believed it was a deity, that as long as kept the stoner, he could not be killed..... a priest said he had a dream . . . the Goddesss of the Earth told him she had madethe Sea of Flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea,and was sending the jewel to him through the river. But when the river dried up, and the Prince plucked it out, the Goddess became enraged, she cursed it the stone and whoever kept it. . . . . The Curse was this: the keeper ofthe stone would live forever, but so long as he kept it, misfortunes would fall on those he loved one after another in unending rain. . . . But if the keeper threw the diamond into the sea, thereby delivering it to its rightful recipient, the goddess would lift the curse.

[Random French broadcast]:

"The brain is locked in total darkness. . . it floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims withcolor and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

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

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea:

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite. ”



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

So really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

Time is a slippery thing: please hold of it once, and it's draining might sail out of your hands forever.

To shut your eyes is the guest nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and bases and buildings exist a rawer and older world, A place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.

Does the brain which lives without a spark of light fill for us a world full of light?

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, Atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. 40 weeks later, 6 trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mothers birth canal and we howl. Then the world start in on us.
....
To men like that,  Time was a surfeit, A barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry around in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

..... And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manee 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 flew above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out to the other side, The air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

Every hour... Someone for whom the war was in memory falls out of the world.

We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.