Angel
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PERHAPS THE world seems a dark place at the moment. You might say that some societies are stuck in the Dark Ages. You can procure all sorts of illegal things on the dark web, or visit landmarks associated with death and suffering as part of the dark-tourism industry. You might know a dark horse—someone who keeps you in the dark about their skills and interests. In the Anglophone world, darkness has several symbolic meanings, few of them positive. Why?
Part of it is evolutionary, as beasts hunt under the cover of night. Such fears are embodied in the figure of Grendel in “Beowulf”, “a creature of darkness, exiled from happiness and accursed of God, the destroyer and devourer of our human kind”, as well as Grendel’s mother, who dwells in a watery cave. Other horrifying predators have lurked in the shadows, such as Pennywise the Clown in “It” and Voldemort, the “Dark Lord” and nemesis of Harry Potter (whose defining feature is a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt).
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Darkness is an ally to crime. Lady Macbeth yearned for night “that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heavens peep through the blanket of the dark”. It hides the identity of Harry Lime (pictured below), an elusive Viennese mobster, when he first appears in “The Third Man”, swallowed by a shadowed doorway save for his shoes. Yet darkness is indiscriminate in its cover. Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus escape Herod at night, while a darkened bedroom is the signal for Tristan to arrive at Isolde’s window for a passionate rendez-vous.
Darkness makes it hard to see clearly, and so it has become bound up with ignorance. In his “Allegory of the Cave”—which imagines people who have been imprisoned in a cave since they were children and who believe shadows on the wall to be real objects—Plato stated that he sought to “compare the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature”. Those who are rational and well-informed are considered “enlightened”, and the word was adopted for the intellectual movement of the 18th century. Even the Washington Post’s new motto declares that “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.
The leap from intellectual to moral ignorance is a small one, and so darkness is evocative here too. God, Allah or Yahweh are the light of the world; to be in darkness is an abandonment. The Koran condemns sinners to “darkness upon darkness”. In Dante’s “Inferno”, hell is “solid darkness stain’d”; in “Paradise Lost”, Milton saw it filled with flames emitting “no light, rather darkness visible”. Cormac McCarthy begins “The Road”, his post-apocalyptic tale of a wasteland populated by rapists and cannibals, with “nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” Religious architecture evolved to banish dark spaces, like the towering, many-windowed mosques of Mimar Sinan and the Abbey of St Denis, which pioneered the taller windows of the Gothic style. Abbot Suger, who was involved in the reconstruction of the church, believed that “the dull mind rises to truth…in seeing this light”.
Yet all this is not true of other cultures. Lao Tzu, the founder of Daoism, thought that insight was to be found in darkness. Gloom is “the gateway to all understanding”, he said, for accepting the unknown is integral to knowledge of the universe. In Tibetan Buddhism, senior monks practise “dark meditation” in unlit caves to eliminate distractions; the Kogi of Colombia also find wisdom in the dark, enclosing some male children in a dark cave for the first nine years of their lives as part of their spiritual training.
Darkness has played an important creative role. When Japan rapidly industrialised in the 1930s, bringing electric power to 90% of its population, Junichiro Tanizaki, a writer, lamented that it had made much in the country ugly. Under the harsh glare of a light-bulb, Noh opera became a ridiculous clown act, traditional black lacquerware appeared tasteless and interiors became “a mere void”, empty of the shapes and shades of shadow.
Novalis, a German philosopher and poet, argued that imagination “loves the night”, when it can break free from the confines of the visible world. Nocturnal visions gave Horace Walpole the inspiration for the first Gothic novel, “The Castle of Otranto”, and Mary Shelley for “Frankenstein”. Charles Baudelaire and Erik Satie would wander the streets of Paris at night searching for a bright idea in a dark space. Paul Simon found that composing in a bathroom without the lights on helped his song-writing: he greets darkness as an “old friend” in “The Sound of Silence”.
Still, darkness will always be associated with death—and therefore with the morbid, bleak and depressing. “Common sense tells us,” Vladimir Nabokov said, “that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Even this, though, need not fill people with dread. In 1969, while Michael Collins was orbiting the moon in a lunar module, seeing nothing but the infinite black void of space filled him with “exultation”. He had found a sublime beauty in dark places.
Thank you
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/10/02/a-meditation-on-darkness
Part of it is evolutionary, as beasts hunt under the cover of night. Such fears are embodied in the figure of Grendel in “Beowulf”, “a creature of darkness, exiled from happiness and accursed of God, the destroyer and devourer of our human kind”, as well as Grendel’s mother, who dwells in a watery cave. Other horrifying predators have lurked in the shadows, such as Pennywise the Clown in “It” and Voldemort, the “Dark Lord” and nemesis of Harry Potter (whose defining feature is a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt).
Get our daily newsletter
Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor’s Picks.
Darkness is an ally to crime. Lady Macbeth yearned for night “that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heavens peep through the blanket of the dark”. It hides the identity of Harry Lime (pictured below), an elusive Viennese mobster, when he first appears in “The Third Man”, swallowed by a shadowed doorway save for his shoes. Yet darkness is indiscriminate in its cover. Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus escape Herod at night, while a darkened bedroom is the signal for Tristan to arrive at Isolde’s window for a passionate rendez-vous.
Darkness makes it hard to see clearly, and so it has become bound up with ignorance. In his “Allegory of the Cave”—which imagines people who have been imprisoned in a cave since they were children and who believe shadows on the wall to be real objects—Plato stated that he sought to “compare the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature”. Those who are rational and well-informed are considered “enlightened”, and the word was adopted for the intellectual movement of the 18th century. Even the Washington Post’s new motto declares that “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.
The leap from intellectual to moral ignorance is a small one, and so darkness is evocative here too. God, Allah or Yahweh are the light of the world; to be in darkness is an abandonment. The Koran condemns sinners to “darkness upon darkness”. In Dante’s “Inferno”, hell is “solid darkness stain’d”; in “Paradise Lost”, Milton saw it filled with flames emitting “no light, rather darkness visible”. Cormac McCarthy begins “The Road”, his post-apocalyptic tale of a wasteland populated by rapists and cannibals, with “nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” Religious architecture evolved to banish dark spaces, like the towering, many-windowed mosques of Mimar Sinan and the Abbey of St Denis, which pioneered the taller windows of the Gothic style. Abbot Suger, who was involved in the reconstruction of the church, believed that “the dull mind rises to truth…in seeing this light”.
Yet all this is not true of other cultures. Lao Tzu, the founder of Daoism, thought that insight was to be found in darkness. Gloom is “the gateway to all understanding”, he said, for accepting the unknown is integral to knowledge of the universe. In Tibetan Buddhism, senior monks practise “dark meditation” in unlit caves to eliminate distractions; the Kogi of Colombia also find wisdom in the dark, enclosing some male children in a dark cave for the first nine years of their lives as part of their spiritual training.
Darkness has played an important creative role. When Japan rapidly industrialised in the 1930s, bringing electric power to 90% of its population, Junichiro Tanizaki, a writer, lamented that it had made much in the country ugly. Under the harsh glare of a light-bulb, Noh opera became a ridiculous clown act, traditional black lacquerware appeared tasteless and interiors became “a mere void”, empty of the shapes and shades of shadow.
Novalis, a German philosopher and poet, argued that imagination “loves the night”, when it can break free from the confines of the visible world. Nocturnal visions gave Horace Walpole the inspiration for the first Gothic novel, “The Castle of Otranto”, and Mary Shelley for “Frankenstein”. Charles Baudelaire and Erik Satie would wander the streets of Paris at night searching for a bright idea in a dark space. Paul Simon found that composing in a bathroom without the lights on helped his song-writing: he greets darkness as an “old friend” in “The Sound of Silence”.
Still, darkness will always be associated with death—and therefore with the morbid, bleak and depressing. “Common sense tells us,” Vladimir Nabokov said, “that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Even this, though, need not fill people with dread. In 1969, while Michael Collins was orbiting the moon in a lunar module, seeing nothing but the infinite black void of space filled him with “exultation”. He had found a sublime beauty in dark places.
Thank you
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/10/02/a-meditation-on-darkness