Not Afraid of the Dark

There are days when taking one step, looking just far enough ahead to figure out where to place my foot, is more difficult than on others. Yesterday was one of those. A post I had seen on Instagram, warning of someone’s planned actions, along with the pages of Doctor Zhivago, had pushed a grey cloud between the sun and me.

Zhivago and Lara are just trying, each day, to stay alive, walling themselves off from the part of the house overrun with rats, working their two or three jobs each, and swallowing in silence—apparently, unsuccessfully—the thoughts that don’t pass muster with those currently in power. The Revolution in Russia is still being fought among partisan groups, and Siberian villages, like Zhivago and Lara’s, are being raided, wiped out, and raped of grain and other foodstuffs desperately needed in Moscow. Dissidents are being killed, or—if they’re lucky—exiled to other countries. Allegiances switch at the drop of a hat, and nobody is safe.

It all hits too close to home, here in the year 2020. Just this morning, René Girard, in the pages of Deceit, Desire & the Novel, connected even more succinctly the state of our world with the state of Russia one hundred years ago. It was a good reminder that I need to actively guard against angst, and to that end I should periodically check to ensure that I’m taking the right steps, like spending less time on Twitter and unfollowing one person on Instagram each day, for there has likely never been a more effective tool for stoking the fires of metaphysical desire and worry than social media.

A bit before 8:00 this evening, darkness will fall, and it is good. The black sky covers tomorrow’s worries. At least it should. Sure, there are times when the darkness amplifies the what-ifs and carries panic on the silent air that surrounds us, but in his sonnet Acceptance, Robert Frost reminds me that it shouldn’t be that way:

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.”

Henry and Stella were out in the backyard the other night, watching for meteors. They saw a few. I loved that they took it upon themselves to go out and do it, and I thought of the time I lay on the ground gazing up at the Milky Way with a friend from work. We, along with the other members of our department at the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver, were at a retreat center in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, there to build relationships with coworkers, learn new ways of managing time and work/life, and maybe even strengthen our faith in God. The Milky Way was magical. I had never before seen it so clearly.

Isn’t it amazing what total darkness, away from the lights of the city and civilization, lets us see?