By Dave Andrusko
Last night my wife and I attended a sneak preview of a movie based on a book by author Lee Strobel. Without getting into the substance of the film, there is a scene is which Strobel, who earlier in his career was an award-winning investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, goes to a hospital to visit a man who had been falsely sent to prison, largely based on a story Strobel wrote.
In a sense Strobel was an unwilling stooge but in the film his desire for fame led him to cut investigative corners. Strobel apologies for not seeing the truth. The man, who had barely survived a brutal beating in prison, rejoins, “You didn’t want to see the truth.”
When we left the theatre I thought of a lecture Lisa and I attended last year delivered by Anthony Doerr, the novelist whose All the Light We Cannot See was a New York Times 2014 bestseller. We had been invited by our youngest daughter Louisa, who had read the book. We hadn’t.
Doerr is a brilliantly accomplished story-teller, as an author or in person. He charmed the packed audience which (judging by the caliber of the questions) was comprised of serious readers who’d read All the Light We Cannot See very carefully and with insight.
Doerr joked about how, when he won the Pulitzer for the book, he’d get calls from reporters asking him to summarize in 30 seconds an immensely long [531 pages] and very complicated work which comes packed with flashbacks.
In the spirit of that request, here’s a summary from The Guardian:
All the Light We Cannot See follows two children whose fates are entwined by the second world war. One, a French girl named Marie-Laure, is blind. The other, a German boy named Werner, is a whiz with radios. Without giving much away, these complementary qualities lead them on a clear path towards each other. The novel has been praised in, among other publications, the Guardian as a “page-turner.”
In fact, according to my daughter and multiple reviews I read and Doerr’s dazzling presentation, All the Light We Cannot See raises moral issues of the most profound kind that this or any other snippet could not do justice to.
To understand one of the key motifs of the book, we need to know about a kind of cheap radio Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, mass produced to spread the Nazi message of hate and “Aryan” superiority. For our purposes, the point is that the radios [Volksempfänger ]were built in a manner that the listener could not tune in foreign broadcasts. Getting around that built-in defect–and what happens because of it– is a central plot in the book.
Let me make two points.
First, I am not by any stretch of the imagination comparing what comes out of most of our mainstream media on the abortion issue with Goebbels’ savagery. That would be just stupid. Besides pro-lifers were never forbidden from listening to competing “foreign broadcasts.”
What I am saying is that once upon a time, there was no NRL News or NRL News Today or any of the many other fine pro-life news outlets, nor the vast communication network we all use to reach people around the world.
What the average person heard about unborn babies was drivel and highly dehumanizing. Now people–and not just confirmed pro-lifers–have access to the truth about the marvelous prenatal journey each of us takes as a developing human being.
It is also true, however, that many, many people do not want to know the truth, an attitude-cum-blindness the prisoner accused Strobel of harboring. Overcoming that hurtle is one of our primary challenges.
Wislawa Szymborska
Second, Doerr referenced a passage from the work of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska which clearly meant a great deal to him. It comes from Ms. Szymborska’s December 7, 1996, Nobel Lecture, “The Poet and the World.” I had not read the lecture but Doerr’s reference made me read it that same night [].
The passage he alluded to comes near the end where she is meditating on how “astonishing” the world is:
But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.
Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.
You already see where I’m going with this. You don’t have to be a poet, let alone a Nobel-prize winner, to be awed by the knowledge that everyone’s existence is singular.
Everyone, born and unborn, is unique. There is nothing “usual”– commonplace or lacking in significance–in the tiniest unborn child or the oldest woman in a nursing home. Each is, to borrow from Ms. Szymborska, “astonishing.”
That is “the light,” unfortunately, that many cannot see.
Nothing–absolutely nothing–more fundamentally separates pro-lifers from pro-abortionists than this foundational principal. Why? Simply because if we are essentially indistinguishable; if we are like mass-produced widgets with no overriding moral worth that must be respected, then our lives are forever on the chopping block.
I’ve now put it off for the better part of a year. When I get home tonight I will have to put away the remote and dig into All the Light We Cannot See.
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