Author's note - Lots of you want to know what happens in Part Three of the story of the princess and the hat maker. You'll find out. Hang in there two more days. In the mean time, let me just tell you that princesses can be cruel. Princesses can ask you to share your greatest weakness then attack it once it's known. Princesses should die. They should do so soon and spare the world the agony they cause.
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Night falls and it tarries. Days rush. They speed along consuming their very nourishment in a dash to complete their flittering cycle through the death of a swallowing blackness. Night devours dying day, each night, every night, all night – and whereas day hurries its own mortality, night extends its death and defies the dawn to ever break again. It holds fast in cold, clenched fists, digs in its ghoulish heels and forestalls the coming of the light with menacing glowers, dragging earth and sky and ensnared, soil-bound souls all the way along.
It isn’t the just the fear of night that haunts the end of day, it is the inexorability of its march. The absolute certainty of darkness terrifies the well-lit heart. The darkness comes first. But in the early darkness certain resistant souls cling to the business of life. They scurry, and dance and know the frivolity of day for a time, all enshrouded in the cover of darkness like celebrants at the end of time. Soon, though, comes the quietness.
The quietness is the most horrifying part. When the last vestiges of revelry drain from those Dionysian supplicants and there is only the vastness of a deathly night, its darkness, its unmurmuring silence, its imprisoning force and weight and its deprivation of contact. The quietness is the killing.
And for the soul that does not sleep, or know the smell of a beloved’s hair, or the gentle rising of a sheet beneath her breathing, or the lovingly closed eyes of a child some few strides away, or the promise of an embrace in the distant but eventual morning, or even the sound of a dark ocean against the rocks – nothing – for that soul, the length of night is infinite and infinity holds no comfort.
What grace is given the soul alone in the dark quietness of night is given in small batches. For some, it is the promise of new battles to be fought in the morning. For others, it is the anticipation of love. For a sad few, those for whom the batch is so small it will barely sustain life even in the light, it is only the faint hope that there might be a word, or a breath exchanged, or maybe a new image, or even just the mention of her. For that sad few, perhaps the triviality of day is as punitive as the solitude of night and for them, perhaps, night, after all, as a form of death, is more merciful than life.
It isn’t the just the fear of night that haunts the end of day, it is the inexorability of its march. The absolute certainty of darkness terrifies the well-lit heart. The darkness comes first. But in the early darkness certain resistant souls cling to the business of life. They scurry, and dance and know the frivolity of day for a time, all enshrouded in the cover of darkness like celebrants at the end of time. Soon, though, comes the quietness.
The quietness is the most horrifying part. When the last vestiges of revelry drain from those Dionysian supplicants and there is only the vastness of a deathly night, its darkness, its unmurmuring silence, its imprisoning force and weight and its deprivation of contact. The quietness is the killing.
And for the soul that does not sleep, or know the smell of a beloved’s hair, or the gentle rising of a sheet beneath her breathing, or the lovingly closed eyes of a child some few strides away, or the promise of an embrace in the distant but eventual morning, or even the sound of a dark ocean against the rocks – nothing – for that soul, the length of night is infinite and infinity holds no comfort.
What grace is given the soul alone in the dark quietness of night is given in small batches. For some, it is the promise of new battles to be fought in the morning. For others, it is the anticipation of love. For a sad few, those for whom the batch is so small it will barely sustain life even in the light, it is only the faint hope that there might be a word, or a breath exchanged, or maybe a new image, or even just the mention of her. For that sad few, perhaps the triviality of day is as punitive as the solitude of night and for them, perhaps, night, after all, as a form of death, is more merciful than life.
