Light and Dark

There are two big trees in my gar­den under which, when friends are vis­it­ing, we sit and talk, some­times dur­ing the day, but usu­ally at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhib­ited, wider-ranging, strangely more stim­u­lat­ing. There is some­thing about sit­ting out­side in the dark that seems con­ducive to unfet­tered conversation. 

Jorge Luis Borges inher­ited from his father a dis­ease that he knew would even­tu­ally leave him blind. Sometime after his fifti­eth birth­day, he noticed that his sight was grow­ing much worse. The doc­tor for­bade him to read in dim light. One day, on a train jour­ney, he was so engrossed in a detec­tive novel he was read­ing that he car­ried on, page after page, in the fad­ing light of the evening. Shortly before his des­ti­na­tion, the train entered a tun­nel. When it emerged, Borges could no longer see any­thing, except a coloured haze in the “dark­ness vis­i­ble” that Milton thought was hell. In that dark­ness Borges lived for the rest of his life, com­pos­ing poems, essays and sto­ries. In the light of the first half of his life, he wrote and read silently; in the gloom of the sec­ond, he dic­tated and had oth­ers read out loud for him. Darkness pro­motes speech. Light is silent; or, as Henry Fielding explains in Amelia, “Tace, madam, is Latin for a candle.” 

Tradition tells us that words, not light, came first, out of the pri­mor­dial dark­ness. According to a Talmudic leg­end, when God set out to cre­ate the world, the twenty-two let­ters of the alpha­bet descended from the ter­ri­ble and august crown of God and begged Him to effect His cre­ation through them. God con­sented. He allowed the alpha­bet to give birth to the heav­ens and the earth in dark­ness, and then to bring forth the first ray of light from the earth’s core, so that it might pierce the Holy Land and illu­mi­nate the entire uni­verse. Light (what we take to be light, Sir Thomas Browne tells us) is only the shadow of God, in whose radi­ance read­ing is no longer pos­si­ble. God’s back was enough to daz­zle Moses, who had to wait until he was back in the dark­ness of the Sinai in order to read to the Jews their Lord’s com­mand­ments, through whose words the light shines upon the world. St. John, with praise­wor­thy econ­omy, summed up the events in one famous line: “In the begin­ning was the Word.” 

Words call for light, bring it into being, and then mourn its pass­ing. The poet Dylan Thomas urged his father not to allow him­self to die by press­ing now famous words on the old man: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” And Othello too, in agony, unable to say more words (the words that lend him life on the page), con­fuses the light of can­dles with the light of life, and sees them as one and the same: “Put out the light,” he orders, “and then put out the light.” Words call for light, but light seems to oppose the active word. When Thomas Jefferson intro­duced the Argand lamp to New England in the mid-eighteenth cen­tury, it was observed that the con­ver­sa­tion at din­ner tables, once lit by can­dle­light, ceased to be as bril­liant as before, because those who excelled in talk­ing now took to their rooms to read silently in bed. “I have too much light,” says the Buddha, and refuses to say another word. 

In one other sense words cre­ate light. The Mesopotamian who wished to con­tinue his read­ing when night had fallen; the Roman who intended to pur­sue his stu­dious doc­u­ments after din­ner, the monk in his cell and the scholar in his study after hav­ing said the evening prayers, the courtier retir­ing to his bed­cham­ber and the lady to her boudoir, the child hid­ing beneath the cov­ers to read after cur­few — all set up, for the sake of the words they sought to read, the light that would illu­mi­nate their search. In the National Archeological Museum in Naples stands an oil lamp from Pompeii in whose light Pliny the Elder might have read his last book before set­ting off to die in the erup­tion of 79 A.D. Somewhere in Stratford, Ontario, is a soli­tary can­dle­holder that came (it is said) from Shakespeare’s house; it once held a can­dle whose brief life Macbeth saw as a reflec­tion of his own. The lamps that guided Dante’s read­ing in Ravenna and Racine’s read­ing in Port-Royal, Stendhal’s in Rome and De Quincey’s in London, all were born from words call­ing from between the cov­ers, light assist­ing the birth of light. 

Sometimes light, once born, is self-sufficient and doesn’t need words to tell a story. Seeing the daz­zling dis­play of lights on Broadway, G. K. Chesterton exclaimed: “What a won­der­ful sight this would be, if only we couldn’t read!” The night land­scape, once dot­ted with the glim­mer of stars and fires, is now stud­ded with the eerie glit­ter of tele­vi­sion and com­puter screens, grey, blue and green, sig­nalling their des­per­ately brief mes­sages that pro­claim the abo­li­tion of time and space. They require no con­tent, assume no par­tic­u­lar reader: light for the sake of light, beyond illumination. 

“May the obscure poet per­se­vere in his obscu­rity, if he wishes to reach illu­mi­na­tion,” wrote Jean Paulhan, for whom light, born from words, became a text that, in its absolute clar­ity, no longer required reading.