The humility stems from his love of God, his adoration of his parents, and his admiration of his friends. The author speaks of the great things he did and yet the story is humble. Lovers of memoir will find the entire narrative majestic and heroic. But others might be skeptical, confused, or dumfounded. Those who understand Quantum Physics might understand. When Lusseyran speaks of living light or the morality of sounds, some Christians and New Agers may understand. The world of spirit is readily understood by those whose minds are rooted in the earthly way of seeing. Spiritual books open the world of spirit to those who are willing to see it. Seeing the child, Lusseyran is horrified at what his own life had been if his parents had not challenged the accepted norms of educating the blind or the accepted human idea of physical reality. One of the most harrowing experiences in the book concerns the author’s meeting with a blind despondent child whose parents had not understood the different way of “seeing” and had effectively shut down the emergence of the child’s other senses. But none of these challenges affected Lusseyran’s natural optimism, an optimism which was based on his trust in God’s love and pity. The first was when the fascist Vichy government declared that blind people could not teach. Still there were moments when blindness affected his optimism. His blindness does not shrink his life or impinge on him but turns out to be freeing. But he is not imprisoned by his blindness. Throughout the book, the author is of course blind. The third section details the author’s imprisonment.
Lovers of war history will like this and the last section although some readers may be hard put to make it through the first section. Those who live in countries which have never known life under the occupation of a foreign power will begin to understand the great work of the French Resistance. But as one reads - and puts aside the idea that these young teenagers are merely playing at war– one sees the importance of the work they carried out. This is true especially if the reader does not understand the work of the French Resistance during the Nazi Occupation. The second section - that in which Lusseyran describes the work of the Resistance and his part in it– reads at first like a story about young boys pretending to be important. It is energizing, amazing, spiritual truth, yet to the more rigid-minded whose ideas of life are rooted in mundane ideas of how the world “really operates” this section might seem poetic at best and deluded at worst. The almost mystical feel of the narrative would affirm truth to those who are acquainted with the magical in life. The first, about the author’s blindness and subsequent discovery of a different way of seeing, is spiritual, philosophical, almost rhapsodic in its depiction of the greater inner light that guided him and helped him to see. A book with three such disparate sections will elicit different reactions depending on the writer’s heart and interests. The first is about his blindness, the second about his work in the Resistance, the third about his time in a prison camp and release. But the autobiographical relating of Jacques Lusseyran’s life does fall neatly into three sections.
This is a subtle division, of course, because one’s life is generally not laid out in clearly demarcated lines. This is because And There was Light is divided into three sections. But for some, it might be the second section. And There was Light is such a book - at least in the first section. Some books remove the cap from our head, and open the top of our skulls. Some books remind the reader of why books are read in the first place – because they open the eyes and heart to new worlds that the reader had never dreamed of. Or the other book will not compare favorably. Some books should not be read with other books. The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
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