All The Light We Cannot See
All the light we cannot see
Some of my fav passages ♡
At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country. The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.
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What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.
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Marie-Laure listens to honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them: each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets on her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home.
How do they know what parts to play, those little bees _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
She holds out a hand, and sparrows land one by one on her arms, and she tucks each one into her coat. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain in pieces back to the earth.
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Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
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To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.
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But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.
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We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. 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. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
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“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.
It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?
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Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
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That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.
We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.
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“I am only alive because I have not yet died.”
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More Posts from Autumnal-hues and Others
you are not as damned as you think you are
submit me webweaving posts :)
@chloeinletters @pratikdherange
A: Hi how are you?
B: Lemme disassociate real quick then get back to you.
B: I am just a body made from billions of years of evolution with lingering monkey brain. the universe doesn't even know I exist and nothing I do will ever matter. I'm just a character in a story laying my part because I know nothing else. if life is pointless and the universe is cold and indifferent then it's okay if I fuck up because that means nothing either, so I might as well be as reckless as possible while I'm alive for this sliver in time.
B: Hi I'm back, can I have an iced machiato with 15 pumps of vanilla please
A: What the fuck
How Do Court Reporters Keep Straight Faces? These are from a book called Disorder in the Courts and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while the exchanges were taking place. ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning? WITNESS: He said, ‘Where am I, Cathy?’ ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you? WITNESS: My name is Susan! _______________________________ ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact? WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks. ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active? WITNESS: No, I just lie there. ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth? WITNESS: July 18th. ATTORNEY: What year? WITNESS: Every year. _____________________________________ ATTORNEY: How old is your son, the one living with you? WITNESS: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can’t remember which. ATTORNEY: How long has he lived with you? WITNESS: Forty-five years. _________________________________ ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all? WITNESS: Yes. ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory? WITNESS: I forget.. ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot? ___________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning? WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam? ____________________________________ ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he? WITNESS: He’s 20, much like your IQ. ___________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken? WITNESS: Are you shitting me? _________________________________________ ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th? WITNESS: Yes. ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time? WITNESS: Getting laid ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: She had three children , right? WITNESS: Yes. ATTORNEY: How many were boys? WITNESS: None. ATTORNEY: Were there any girls? WITNESS: Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney? ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated? WITNESS: By death.. ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated? WITNESS: Take a guess. ___________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual? WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female? WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I’m going with male. _____________________________________ ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney? WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work. ______________________________________ ATTORNEY: Doctor , how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people? WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight. _________________________________________ ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to? WITNESS: Oral… _________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body? WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 PM ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time? WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished. ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample? WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question? ______________________________________ And last: ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse? WITNESS: No. ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure? WITNESS: No. ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing? WITNESS: No.. ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy? WITNESS: No. ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor? WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar. ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless? WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.
Every "Title of your sex tape" joke in Brooklyn Nine-Nine
"Kind, sober and fully dressed", Jake to Amy
"I'm sorry about tonight", Jake to Amy
"It's not your fault, I was terrible", Jake to Amy
"I'm horrible at this, when can we stop", Jake to Amy
"Ah, well done", Jake to himself
"I'm with someone and nothing is going to happen", Jake to Amy
"This better not bite me in the ass", Jake to Amy
"Uh oh, hope it doesn't get too sexual", Jake to Amy
"Blast of cold air coming out of that box", Jake to Amy
"Why doesn't your mouth work", Jake to Amy
"I hope it wasn't a mistake", Jake to Amy (right after they fuck for the first time)
"I just got it out of the vent to rub it in your faces", Jake to Amy
"One more 'but' and you're in contempt", Jake to the judge at his trial
"I'm so confused, I don't know what's happening right now", Jake to Amy
"I'm shaking right now, I'm definitely going to cry" Amy to Jake
"Seriously, what is taking so long?" Jake to Amy
"My mother has a fantastic basement", Jake to Holt
"I came alone", Jake to Jimmy Figis
"That's not how holes work", Jake to Boyle
"Why don't we take this map and this sextant and chart a course to the restaurant", Holt to Boyle
"Did not work at all but I love that you attempted it" Jake to Holt
"Jake and Amy are getting married tonight", Boyle to himself
"Sorry, that came out weird", Jake to Holt
"It's hard for some people", Jake to a therapist
"It just slipped out", Rosa to Boyle
"I came as fast as I could ", Jake to Amy
"There's not even any soft parts in the middle we could pull out", Jake to Hitchcock and Scully
"Grabbed whatever and yanked", Boyle to Dr Oliver Cox
"Just show me the tip", Jake to Holt
"She's coming, hide!" Jake to Holt
"Quite hard upon me", Jake to himeself
"Demon in your jeans", Jake to his father
"Cockpit Larry and the mile-high stewardi", Jake's dad's actual sex tape
Weird that Doug Judy and Gina aren't on the list 🤔 🤔
the question Inception asks is "what would you risk it all for?". the question Interstellar asks is "what would you live for?" and the question Tenet asks is "what would you die for?". and the answer to all three is love.
TIL that the Audubon Society has released official statements on the difference between a "bird", a "birb", and a "borb", featuring such gems as:
I'M DOING AN EXPERIMENT
To prove something to a friend, please
REBLOG IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES
LIKE IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS DON’T BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES
Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy // Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women // Robin Roe, A List of Cages // Hayao Miyazaki, Kiki's Delivery Service // Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 // D. H. Lawrence, The Plumbed Serpent // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart // Alice Oseman, Radio Silence // Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
Rewatched The Good Place for the first time since s4 dropped and. Oh my god. The Good Place said "people are a result of their environment but we always have a moral responsibility to be better" and The Good Place said "every day the world gets a little more complicated and it gets a little harder to be good" and The Good Place said "even in the face of total nihilism, when nothing you do will matter, you still have to at least try. Because trying is better than the alternative" and The Good Place said "if you have bills to pay and shit to deal with you don't have time or energy to become a better person" and then The Good Place really said "people get better when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don't " and THEN The Good Place really said "no one is irredeemable. Everyone can try to be better today than they were yesterday" AND THEN! The Good Place said "Heaven is just enough time with the people that you love" OH MY FUCKING GOD.
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone / This is How You Lose the Time War
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She/her | 20 | Mostly failing to "hold my balance on this spinning crust of soil."
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