Letter #244: All the Light We Cannot See

And they lived happily ever after.

Dad,

I have this problem that my happiest and most exciting days are also the most boring to talk about. Say I get dinner with a friend. He opens the conversation like everyone does: what’s new with you? And somehow that basic question leaves me gaping like a fish.

What’s new? Well…nothing. And everything!! I sat at my desk and wrote my book, I went to the gym, I made dinner. But the work was an adventure and the dinner was bliss. How to put that into words?

There’s one other reason why villains are sometimes more interesting than heroes. It has to do with Augustine’s observation that good is the primary reality, and evil is only its shadow side. When things are going well, it feels normal at some deep level, even if it happens very rarely. We never quite appreciate the good times while they’re happening because that’s how it was always supposed to be.

Joy is exhilarating, in other words, but it’s also the most natural thing in the world. How do you describe what comes naturally? How do you explain what it feels like to breathe? “Imaginary good is boring,” said Weil, which explains why Tolstoy could write that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He was exactly right, but only from the perspective of the novelist—from the perspective of the outside, looking in. From the inside, happy families are as different as happy people, alive with texture and variety.

If heaven is like that—an enormous happy family, every soul rambunctious with delight in every other, every soul distinct—then of course we have trouble imagining it. It’s how we were made to be, which is to say, it’s how we are not. We have no experience of a goodness that is perfect and serene but also passionate, urgent, intense. We only know the kind of goodness that comes crashing terribly in, as it must, upon the disjointed wreckage of our ruined world.

“The adventures [our heroes] face take them away from lives of love, achievement and interest.” But we can never quite depict those lives, can we? They are always just over the next hillside, just beyond the time horizon of the story. Mario and Peach have been living sweetly fragrant lives of fungal tranquility since the previous game; when the new one starts, we just happen to walk in on them right as their peace is about to be shattered again.

“And they lived happily ever after”—just in time for the story to end. It has to. We can only guess at what comes next, at “that untravell'd world whose margin fades. / For ever and forever.” We can see the shadows cast by the first glow of dawn. But we have to shade our eyes, for now, from the rising sun.

Love,

Spencer