S P R I N G T I M E

"She turned to the sunlight, and shook her yellow head, and whispered to her neighbour, Winter is dead."
— A. A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

The strange thing about dreams coming true is that it starts to make you think differently — if I can do this, what else can I do? All of those crazy, far off, wonderful dreams... can I make them happen too? It makes dreams seem a little less scary, a little less crazy, a little more obtainable. 

One of those dreams has been to build this blog into something special — an online journal, filled with content that falls somewhere between the likes of National Geographic and Harper's Bazaar, filled with essays and interviews, features and reviews, adventures and animals and lifestyle and books. But, not just words — photography, illustrations and scrapbook diary-entry type journal entries. Something special, something different. An exhaustive account of the beauty of life. 

I've always been strangely reluctant to begin, though. Everything on the internet screams of over saturation, there are so many damn blogs out there, why bother? How can I launch something when the field is already full of people killing it? It seems too damn ambitious, even for me. But, 
we rarely apply that same logic to physical industries — we don't stop writing books because Stephen King and J.K. Rowling dominate the market. So, this is it, I'm doing it, I'm all in. 

ALL THE LIGHT

—   R E V I E W   —

☆☆☆☆☆

"What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models... 
None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within with spin universes."

---

Oh, this book.
This beautiful, heartbreaking, perfect book. 

I picked up All The Light We Cannot See in the midst of a Doerr frenzy. A chance encounter in a Melbourne bookstore, where I found his travel memoir Four Seasons in Rome, and I'm hooked. There's just something about the way he writes, like he sees every single detail that the world has to offer, and has researched this Earth so meticulously, with such love, that his books become a love letter to nature, history, science... 

All The Light kicks off in WWII Europe, following the soon-to-be interwoven threads of Parisian girl Marie-Laure LeBlanc, and German orphan Werner Pfennig. Now, I think it's the intricacies, the tiny details, that make this book so moving. Werner loves science, and spends his days playing with the wires of radios, and his nights listening to forbidden broadcasts from across the continent. This spurs his story in more ways than one, landing him in the Hitler Youth and chasing memories from his past. 

Marie-Laure is blind, but that doesn't stop her love for the world around her. Her father, Daniel, is a wood worker, and a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. Marie-Laure spends her days in its halls, feeling her way through the molluscs, befriending an old scientist and learning from his works. She's mostly uninhibited by her blindness, due to her father incredible works, crafting precise models of the towns they live, so she can learn her way with her fingers, and then with her feet. 

Sometimes, there is so much detail, is seems quite heavy, but as every one of those details pulls together in the second half of the book, you'll feel a strange sense of nostalgia, and pride for having followed the threads. 

More often than not, my heart ached. It's one of the first books to ever make me gasp out loud, and feels as though I'd lost a friend. I was so deep in Doerr's world that a voice from the other side of my room would make me jump. I was there, feeling my way through the streets of Paris, fiddling with the wires of transceivers, desperately breaking open tins of precious food, hiding in secret places, rebelling through the radio waves. 

All The Light We Cannot see is historical fiction at its very best, it doesn't retell WWII occurrences like the echo of a textbook, is seamlessly weaves fact into beautiful, haunting fiction. 

I'd recommend reading his memoir Four Seasons in Rome before you read this, though. It's not a necessity, by any means, but the memoir follows a year in Rome, as he begins to write All The Light. He wrestles to find inspiration for the novel while in a city spilling with so many more stories, and having read those intimate thoughts, and then the book from which is spurred, you feel a little more connected to it, as if Doerr is a friend to whom you spoke as he wrote, and now you get to read the finished piece. 

Whatever you do, read something of Doerr's. 
You must, it's a treat for your soul. All The Light We Cannot See is haunting, heartbreaking, but above all, beautiful. 

// HELLO BRUGES

It's hard to pinpoint where to start with Bruges — it all feels like a dream, a daze, a fairytale land — a Wes Anderson x Disney theme park, a perfect, quirky village shaped mirage. Perhaps I slipped into a dream state

on the train? Never truly woke up, until the train looped back around to London, 36 hours later? That's what it felt like, at least, and not just for the surroundings. Everything about the place is surreal. 

I arrived by train from sweet Paree, just after midnight. After spending most of my life in Australia, something seems so magical about being able to step on a train in one country, and jump off in another, just a few hours later. Back home it takes almost as long to get to the closest major city. Perhaps that's where the dream began, racing down the tracks at 200 km/ph, cutting through the darkness, travelling in a portal from one country to the next. There was no conductor or guard, and the carriage was all but empty, save a few serious looking business men and a mother and child. Once we crossed the border from France to Belgium, all of the announcements switched to a different language, one I didn't recognise, and I guessed it must be Dutch — there was no moon in the sky and hardly any lights outside the windows, and I had no idea where I was. Hurtling through the dark in a place I didn't know, where I didn't speak even a little of the language, I panicked a little. Surely, surely I would recognise when the driver announced Bruges, right? One of the aforementioned businessmen spotted my panic, and asked where I was heading, in French, and then English — Bruges, I said, and he said he was too, so he would show me when to leave the train. Good job, it turns out, as the announcement seemingly didn't include the name 'Bruges'. 
 

Outside the train station, men yielding chainsaws and picks worked through the night, preparing ice sculptures for an upcoming snow festival, beginning just days later. I looked around for a taxi, but there were none in site, and no one to ask. There was, however, a charming young Dutch boy, waiting by a horse and cart. "Into Bruges?" he shouted, and I blinked at him, confused.  Ice sculptors, horse carts and a cobbled station car park? What is this place?

"There is no taxi this late, we are the taxi!" The boy signalled to his horse - "How much?" "Same as a taxi, miss, 7 euros." - and that was it.  He hoisted my giant, bursting backpack onto the carriage, then helped me up, and the fairytale started to unfold. What better start to this beautiful side trip, than hooves on the cobblestones, carrying me to my next adventure?

PART II — FRIDAY