Humor is the soul’s last line of defense.
Anxious People“Humor is the soul’s last line of defense” is a principle Ro learned from her parents during their family’s flight through the mountains to Sweden. In the novel, it links laughter not to an absence of suffering but to a refusal to let suffering have the final word.
Origin and Meaning
Ro’s family fled across the mountains in winter. The children carried sheets and were told to lie beneath them in the snow when helicopters approached, while their parents ran in different directions to draw fire toward themselves. Ro’s parents taught her that humor was the soul’s last line of defense and that laughter meant they were still alive. Bad puns and fart jokes became their way of defying despair amid the cruelties of war.
Julia’s Memory
Julia learned the story on the night she and Ro first began to get close. When sheets hanging over the bedroom door struck Ro as she opened it, she flinched; Julia noticed and kept asking what was wrong until Ro told her about her family’s flight. Julia was shaken by the violence Ro described, but also by the contrast between that history and the person Ro had become: someone who made other people laugh. The principle therefore carries both a history of danger and a measure of what Ro’s family preserved through it. After that night, Julia got to spend her everyday life with Ro.
