Week 11Fall Week 11
If I could attach a small tag to each of the atoms in my body and travel with them backward in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars in the sky. Those exact atoms.
—Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine
The summer solstice has no effect on me. In June, the leafy trees block so much light it’s hard to notice such gradual changes in the sky. Even growing shorter, the summer days feel endless. Summer itself feels endless. But if I happened to notice the dwindling light, the loss wouldn’t trouble me: the cooler breath of nighttime would make it a cost I’d gladly pay. Besides, night brings lightning bugs—or it used to, before so many people began to drench their yards with poison. Who wouldn’t welcome those flashes of brightness under the trees, even if it meant sharing the yard with mosquitoes, too?
Well, that’s a lament for another day. On this day, I am thinking again of autumn light. In autumn, it’s hard for me to think of anything else, and the light is leaving.
Now that the leaves have dropped from the hardwood trees and the fallen needles have made a golden ring beneath the pines; now that the migrating songbirds have passed us in the night, and the park turtles have hidden themselves in their loamy chambers, and the rattlesnakes on the bluff have found the crevices in the rock where they will sleep through the cold; now that the exaltation of autumn is gone for another year, and the darkness is visibly deeper with every passing afternoon—now is when I begin to yearn for the solstice. I am yearning for the light.
Hope is harder to come by these days, and I find hope more easily in brightness. “More light,” Goethe famously called on his deathbed, and I understand. In light, there is human companionship, birdsong, a sense—however illusory—of forward motion. In light, the horizon extends before us, a tableau of endless possibility, while darkness allows all manner of doubts to burble up. When we have lost our certainty of purpose, our very understanding of ourselves, we speak of enduring a dark night of the soul. How much easier it is to give in to gloom, even dejection, when it is the darkness that feels endless.
When I was in college, I liked to walk through the fields where the agriculture students practiced their future profession. Mostly I walked alone, desperate for solitude in a crowded life, but sometimes I walked with my beloved writing teacher. For her it was cardiac rehab, a way to grow stronger after heart surgery. For me it was a respite from schoolwork, a chance to watch bluebirds diving for insects from fence posts, to listen to wind blowing across the fallow fields. It was also a chance to talk with Ruth. She was a trusted mentor to many other young writers, and I loved having her all to myself.
On one walk she mentioned her method for managing insomnia. I don’t know why it made such an impression on me. I was twenty, an enthusiastic sleeper. I had such a gift for sleep! I once fell asleep at a high school football game, leaning against the warm knees of my friend Mary’s older brother, who sat on the bleachers one row up. Still, I listened as Ruth told me how she had learned to surrender to the wakefulness of aging. She had come to realize that fighting it was what made her so tired. If she kept still and calm, if she never paced the house or checked the clock, she sometimes dropped off again. And even when she didn’t, she rose feeling almost as rested as if she’d slept. “Maybe I need rest even more than I need sleep,” she said.
I think often about that conversation, and not just on restless nights. I am very close to the age Ruth was when she was my teacher, and I’m beginning to believe that her strategy for living with insomnia might work for metaphorical kinds of darkness, too. Instead of fighting it so hard, maybe I should be honest, tell myself the brutal truth: This is the world as it is. This is what we’ve made of it, and there is no going back. This is the best the living world will ever be, and that’s only if we can stop the worst from coming.
I’m not saying I’ve surrendered. I would never surrender. I’m only talking about a temporary ceasefire. Remember the story about the Christmas Day truce during World War I, when German soldiers and English soldiers held their fire, against official policy on both sides, and sang Christmas carols to one another? That’s the kind of ceasefire I mean. The kind where there’s a moment to take a breath. A moment for singing. What would life even be without singing?
I can’t make the hollies stop blooming in November. I can’t tell the bluebirds there’s no time left for another clutch of eggs even if the temperature has settled into the eighties here in December. They don’t know the heat is fleeting, but fretting ensures the survival of not one baby bird.
During my own sleepless nights, I have learned to think of rest as a form of waiting, a state that is both passive and active, resisting the urge to predict but prepared nonetheless for whatever might come.
The night sky is full of stars best seen from a dark place. I try to remember that, too.