DARKNESS

I often wonder what it’s like to live so far up north, it never really gets dark at night in the summer, and it never really gets light in the day in winter. In Fairbanks, Alaska, today, the sun at noon was 6 degrees above the horizon. Hey, that’s almost sunset, at noon! For there were only 6 hours of daylight there, so the sun didn’t have much time to mount high in the sky. Then don’t you suppose that you have a kind of sunrise-sunset for the whole six hours the sun is above the horizon? And probably for an hour or so on either side of those six hours, to boot. If any of our friends here live near the Arctic Circle, maybe you can tell us how the sky appears?

Our Word of the Week is darkness, and that’s a fascinating word, not so much for its origin — from Anglo-Saxon deorcnysse — but for its range of use. If it meant only the absence of physical light, it would be an everyday sort of word, without any moral or cultural force. For example, from the time I was about 12 years old, I haven’t been able to tolerate light if I’m trying to get to sleep. Years ago, my sister the doctor advised me to wear a blindfold, and that I do, every night; and I find the darkness soothing. But I don’t suppose I’d find it soothing if I had to be outdoors in the middle of nowhere, and the sky was overcast, and there was no moon. Then you wish for moonlight at least, and the approach of day. And isn’t it great to be outdoors in the full moon, when you can see all kinds of shadows, and even the brighter and bolder colors? We human beings don’t naturally seek out the dark, because then we’re peculiarly vulnerable; we can’t sniff out a predator as dogs can, or bounce radar signals off the wall of a cave, as bats can do. Yet if you build a fire in a cave, you can feel secure there. You can even turn the place into a haven of celebration and worship, as did the ancient hunters and their genius of a painter in the caves of Lascaux.

But when we say that something is dark, we generally shy away from it, or we approve of it only with conditions attached, or we are attaching some moral disapprobation. “And darkness covered the face of the deep,” says the sacred author at the beginning of Genesis, to convey either non-being or formlessness, which is as close to non-being as a thing can get. People who don’t know much about history will call those 1,000 years between the fall of Rome in the west and the Renaissance the “Dark Ages.” It’s a slander. For in truth, from, say, 962 (the crowning of Otto I as Holy Roman Emperor) to 1348 (the onset of the Black Plague), Europe enjoyed a period of cultural flourishing unsurpassed by any period since — comparable to the height of ancient Greek culture in the heydays of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and the other city-states from about 600 to 350 B.C. I used to tell my students that if they called that era “the Dark Ages” I would clobber them. Dark — when you invent the university; you invent the banking and credit system that enables widespread and global trade; you build the most beautiful structures the world has ever seen; you revive lost arts (the drama, sculpture in the round), and you invent whole genres of literature (the romance, most notably); you reach unprecedented heights in philosophy; you establish chartered towns and guilds; and, because of technological improvements and warm weather, your population doubles.

So, no, it wasn’t dark. Now then, I’ve just come back from visiting my home town in Pennsylvania, and the place was quite garish with big bright signs for gas stations and mini-marts and lawyers’ offices and banks and hair salons and whatnot. They even had their Christmas lights up, two weeks before Thanksgiving. Now, when I was a boy, we didn’t have those garish things. We didn’t have all that many businesses, because the area was depressed after the coal had petered out. We did have huge piles of coal dust, hundreds of feet high, like strange mountains overlooking the town below. Yet my memories of the town are not dark. Homes were modest. Business fronts were not gaudy and garish and overdone. Children swarmed outside whenever the weather was good. We had seven Little League teams (my brother tells me the town now has only one). There’s a kind of homeliness that goes along with hard-working poverty, that doesn’t offend the eye. I miss it: Mr. Paone’s shoe-repair shop; the little Knights of Columbus building that doubled as a candy store next to our school; the simple asphalt-shingled hardware store Mr. and Mrs. Spillane ran (shingles, I mean, on the outer walls); Jimmy Alco’s barber shop, with the candy-stripe pole, and the sign in the window, “Ask for Wildroot”; there wasn’t anything that glared at you. Somehow I find the glare to be darker than the dark.

It’s the difference, I suppose, between the absence of sound, which, sometimes with affection, we call silence, and that stunning kind of sound that is noise, that is “darker” to the ear than silence is. Which leads me to think of another warm and dark place, in that town of mine back in those days; it was the church in the early winter mornings, which we schoolchildren entered while Mass was going on, whenever we arrived, taking our seats with the rest of our class. You might feel uncomfortable in the classroom; but there, never. And why should you? Max Picard wrote a whole book on the life-giving wells of silence; and Saint John of the Cross wrote likewise about “the dark night of the soul,” a dark night that is full of grace and the possibility of great spiritual growth. And when we pray, don’t we sometimes shut our eyes, so that we can see?

“Moonlight on the Delaware River,” Thomas B. Griffin. Public Domain.

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