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Nothing stirs: no farmer materializes in a window with a rifle. The locksmith brings back a shirtful of vegetables and fills a tin bucket at a spigot and eases shut the barn door and feeds his daughter in the dark. Then he folds his coat, lays her head on it, and wipes her face with a shirt.

Two cigarettes left. Inhale, exhale.

Walk the path of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every key its lock.  You can go back to Paris or you can stay here or you can go on.

From outside comes the soft hooting of owls. Distant grumbling of thunder or ordnance or box. He says, “This hotel is very cheap, ma cherie. The innkeeper behind the desk said our room was forty francs a night but only twenty francs if we made our own bed.” He listens to her breathe. “So I said, ‘Oh, we can make our own bed.’ And he said, ‘Right, I’ll get you some nails and wood.’”

From “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr

Brilliant prose by a young author.  Father and daughter flee Paris shortly before the Nazis occupy the city. They find themselves on a farm in the middle of nowhere. They must use their imagination to survive: “The innkeeper behind the desk said our room was forty francs a night but only twenty francs if we made our own bed.” But only a father’s reasoning mind can keep his blind daughter and himself alive: “Walk the path of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every key its lock.”

We have just witnessed horror in Paris. Its people are not stranger to terrible suffering.  I was in the City of Light for five days a year ago. One could breathe happiness everywhere. Groups of youngsters and couples in love enjoyed picnics on the river banks, their bottles of wine always presiding over their casual chats. I spent my waking and sleeping hours with a song stuck in my head: “I love Paris in the springtime …”

Happy Thanksgiving!

Louis