Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Image credit; Austin Chan @ Unsplash

For the visually challenged reader, this image shows a street neon sign that says;

“ This is the sign you’ve been waiting for”

When I wrote that POST the other day about that wonderful glimmer of light that surrounds me when I write, it had me thinking about how I needed that light to shine on other areas of my life, too.

Whether this influenced what happened next, but I like to think that it did.

In my social media prowling, I came across a book called All the Light We Cannot See. I read the description and knew I had to read it.

The Book Description

A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II, from the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr.

When Marie Laure goes blind, aged six, her father builds her a model of their Paris neighborhood, so she can memorize it with her fingers and then navigate the real streets. But when the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, is enchanted by a crude radio. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent ultimately makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.

Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. 

Was this the sign I have waited for?

Later that day, the family were trying to decide what to watch on the TV that evening; I spotted the serial of this book and said I wanted to see it. Four episodes later, I was no nearer to understanding the connection. I still thought there was one, though.

After much research, I discovered that the author of this book was referring to the light of hope we all need. That growing old seems to diminish our capacity to see this light as we become more and more helpless to control or hope for anything. 

But that precious glimmer of light that surrounds me when I write, and the tremulous link to this wonderful story proves to me that we need to nurture these glimmers, build them into a beam of light that will guide us into a better place…