Chasing the Sun

ONE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVELIST, POET, AND ESSAYIST HAS MADE extraordinary use of the Sun. He considered himself a scientist—an expert on butterflies: Vladimir Nabokov. I hadn’t known his work well, but remembered that in his final novel, Ada (1969), the heroine and her brother, Van Veen, wander through the gardens of their ancestral home and begin to play a game. Ada explains the rules:

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Sun enthusiast, ardent lepidopterist, and wordsmith: even the fictional narrator of Pale Fire (1962) is named John Shade. Illu(27.1)

Nabokov was unusually acute about the quality of sunlight, writing in his memoirs, “All colors make me happy, even the gray blood-orange Sun.”⁵ His consciousness of the Sun was heightened by its ability to lessen the effects of a case of psoriasis on occasion so severe that its “indescribable torments” almost drove him to suicide; sunbathing and radiation treatments helped in later life.⁶ He was also synesthetic; his biographer Brian Boyd mentions that as a child Nabokov had a “love of color and light”—both he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in vivid tints—and that he linked his first attempts at poetry “with his mother’s jewels and with stained glass, prisms, spectra, rainbows”:

Such references are very different from the metaphor bank of the Romantics, in which the Sun is primarily a standard-bearer of classical mythology. Nabokov is observant to a fault, alive to anything that the Sun lights upon. He may use the Sun for its symbolic power, as when he writes that Humbert dreams of “the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world),” but—naturalist that he is—he is at his best as a subtle observer of the physical world around him, of the “beauty and animation of the sun and shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrigerator,” or “those southern boulevards at midday that have solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the other.” “I knew the sun shone,” says Humbert, “because my ignition key was reflected in the windshield.” Nabokov’s interest in light melded with his lifelong fascination with butterflies in at least one scene: we note that “a big black glossy Packard”—the one that later kills Lolita’s mother—mounts the lawn and stands “shining in the sun, its doors open like wings.”

Though it is nothing as simple as Lolita representing the Sun, or the Sun her, once she seems to tire of Humbert he confesses, “I hear myself crying from a doorway into the sun.” And before long he is admitting, “The sun had gone out of the game.” After the love of his life has absconded, Humbert has a moment when he thinks he has glimpsed her—“a trick of harlequin light”—and he writes a poem to remind her of an old perfume called (inevitably) “Soleil Vert.” But she has left him forever, and he is forced to accept “that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly … there was in her a garden and a twilight.” Sunsets now are “blotched,” forcing Humbert to drive on and on “through the drizzle of the dying day.” When, years later, he finds Lolita again, she is worn out, vast with the pregnancy that will kill her in her teens, her smile “a frozen little shadow of itself.” Failing to get her to go back with him, he takes off into the night, intent on tracking down and killing Quilty, and when in ghastly fashion he does so, “the sun was visible again, burning like a man,” leaving behind the corpse of her latest abductor while he walks away “through the spotted gaze of the sun.”

Johnston’s research convincingly suggests that the Homeric epics might be among the first works of literature to incorporate a knowledgeable study of the Sun’s apparent motions, as if Homer were intent on setting down what was known about the heavens for future generations. And it is not only the Iliad that displays an extraordinary grasp of astronomical knowledge, she says. In the Odyssey, the symbolism of Odysseus’ return home after nineteen years may show Homer’s grasp of the nineteen-year Metonic cycle, over the course of which the sequence of the Moon’s phases returns to the same days of the year. In one of the Odyssey’s most memorable metaphors, Homer uses the Sun’s position to denote the time of Odysseus’ departure from home:^* “and when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared they again set sail.”⁹

The year after Homer’s Secret Iliad appeared, the work of another amateur critic on another classic would show that it, too, dealt at least in part with astronomy. Dolores Cullen first encountered Chaucer when she was a middle-aged college student in California, and became caught up by his work. In 1998 she published a book about the religious allegories in The Canterbury Tales. But still she was not satisfied. “As I read, I was distracted by questions about the pilgrims. What made this precise group necessary? Chaucer’s reputation was too well known, his skills too well recognized for me to think that the group was a haphazard collection. Why was there one pair of brothers—not from a religious order, but two men related by birth? Why not three brothers or no brothers? Why was there a wife—but no husband and wife? Why no children? Why so few women?”¹⁰ In Chaucer’s Pilgrims: The Allegory, she turns to the poet’s interest in astronomy, and argues that each pilgrim corresponds to a body or bodies in the night sky, which reflect, in name and appearance, the mythical characters after whom the constellations are called. The study was well received.

It is generally known that Chaucer was highly versed in astronomy, and in 1391 even penned a treatise on the astrolabe for his younger son, Lewis; Cullen shows that this interest suffuses The Canterbury Tales, influencing not only the identities of the pilgrims but also their stories. From “The Franklin’s Tale,” with its theories of tides, and of the effects of perihelion (the time when the Earth and Sun are closest to each other), through to “The Parson’s Tale” (about the uses of trigonometry), “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” (about a charlatan alchemist), “The Squire’s Tale” (which takes in the precise relationship between the Sun and Mars), and onward, Chaucer puts astronomy and its related disciplines to intense use. But unlike Homer, he does not seem to be writing for posterity so much as responding to a subject that interests him, confident that his audience, at a time when familiarity with the movement of the heavens was taken for granted, would share that interest.

The same simile does service in Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,”¹² but he made up for this with “To His Coy Mistress”: “Though we cannot make our Sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.” Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was again decidedly pedestrian in his “The glorious lamp of heaven, the Sun / The higher he’s a-getting, / The sooner will his race be run / And nearer he’s to setting.”¹³

The second part of the challenge in earlier times was that references to astronomy had to conform to Church doctrine on matters pertaining to the heavens. In his account of Creation in Paradise Lost, Milton has to resolve the biblical conundrum of where light came from if the Sun were created only on the fourth day, and gets around it by having light shine from its nook under God’s throne for those first few days until it can find its fit place in the Sun. He probably decided to use Ptolemaic astronomy because it was more in accord with scripture, as well as being more worthy of epic; but he is obviously torn, and the possibility of a Sun-centered universe is left open.¹⁴ He can be a master of prevarication: in Book 10, Man’s Fall thrusts the Sun “from the Equinoctial Road”—which can be read as either deflecting the Sun from its course around the celestial equator (as the Ptolemaic system requires) or tilting the Earth on its axis (as in the steadily gaining Copernican system).

During the fifteen hundred years that Ptolemy’s doctrines held sway, writers were generally content to employ the Sun for occasional grandstanding (John Suckling’s “The Sun upon a holiday is not so fine a sight”), about a beautiful girl dancing;^* as an excuse for retelling famous myths (Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella); or as a reference point when examining the heavens.

One exception is the Italian Giulio Camillo (1480–1544), whose influential L’idea del Theatro (The Idea of the Theater) is nothing less than a history of the universe, in which the Sun holds pride of place. Frances Yates, in her study of that writer, explains how his work “shows within the mind and memory of a man of the Renaissance the Sun looming with a new importance, mystical, emotional, magical, the Sun becoming of central significance. It shows an inner movement of the imagination towards the Sun which must be taken into account as one of the factors in the heliocentric revolution.”¹⁵ References to Camillo’s work have figured in the texts of writers from Rousseau to Ted Hughes.

The Sun was soon seized upon throughout Europe as a royal emblem, kings being portrayed in allegory as the embodiment of the Sun’s glorious attributes—notably in City of the Sun by Camillo’s countryman the Dominican Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), a philosophical dialogue fashioned after Plato’s Republic and written in 1602, just after Campanella had been condemned to life imprisonment for sedition and heresy. The city of the title, set on the island of Taprobane (now Sri Lanka), is benignly presided over by a priest-prince called Sun.¹⁶

Both Shakespeare (1564–1616) and John Donne (1572–1631) were Campanella’s contemporaries. The former’s use of the Sun characteristically defies generalization: he is ever a keen observer of the heavens, referring to the Sun more than forty times in the late plays alone. Many of these references occur in a literary form that had its origins in classical poetry but which was brought to perfection by the troubadours of medieval Provence and the Minnesängers of Germany: the aubade, a short lyric of love fulfilled, supposedly uttered at dawn (as opposed to the serenade, sung by a hopeful suitor at evening), and generally lamenting that the lovers must bid farewell to the joys of the night. It has been suggested that the form was an ingenious development from the cry of night watchmen announcing the coming day. Shakespeare made glorious use of aubades, typically planting them as hinge points in his plays.¹⁷

Over the centuries, the aubade was adapted for other purposes, the Victorians, for instance, using it for a graver kind of lament, as Tennyson did in In Memoriam. Perhaps the best known of all English aubades is Donne’s “The Sunne Rising,” which opens seductively:

If this is the first instance of a poet mocking the Sun (I have found none earlier), in Donne’s case there was reason. In 1601, he had secretly married the seventeen-year-old Anne, daughter of Sir George More, the diminutive and irascible lieutenant of the Tower of London (a “short man with a short fuse,” Donne’s latest biographer calls him). He wrote to the livid father: “Sir, I acknowledge my fault to be so great as I dare scarce offer any other prayer to you in mine own behalf than this, to believe that I neither had dishonest end nor means.… I humbly beg of you that she may not, to her danger, feel the terror of your sudden anger.” Sir George replied by having him thrown into the Fleet Prison for some weeks (along with the priest who performed the marriage), attempting (unsuccessfully) to annul the union, and getting Donne’s employer to dismiss him. “John Donne, Ann Donne, Undone” went the popular epigram, attributed to Donne himself. For the next decade the poet and his family struggled in near poverty; not until 1609 were he and his father-in-law reconciled. But from the perspective of immortality, Donne definitely had the last word. Sir George, borrowing from the Psalms, had published his own vision of sunrise, a very different one from Donne’s:^*

He was to write a number of other poems deploying the Sun as a metaphor, but he also wrote a satire, Ignatius His Conclave, which in the course of attacking the Jesuits (for Donne was a fervent Anglican convert from Rome) ridiculed many of the new scientific theories, and in particular the argument that the Earth circled the Sun. He was to express his views even more forcefully in verse:

This appeared in 1611, the same year that Galileo reported the existence of spots on the Sun and valleys on the Moon.

By the 1690s Newton had explained the operation of gravity, the makeup of the Sun’s rays, and the origin of rainbows. The Scientific Revolution was in full flood, whether the world of poesy liked it or not, and certainly there were those in that world who didn’t. William Blake (1757–1827), for instance, had no use for science, and viewed its advance as one of the evils of the day. One poem mentions the Sun, but without any post-Copernican trappings:

This has been variously interpreted, the image usually taken to represent man’s yearning to escape the transience of this world for the golden eternity of the next. Blake may also have been alluding to the Greek legend in which the sunflower was created when a woman “pined away with desire” after the sun god and so turned into his flower. But whatever meaning we finally assign, here was a major poet using the Sun for symbolic purposes that were quite separate from any scientific findings.

Samuel Coleridge (1772–1834) was a more typical man of his time. “I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark,” he wrote enthusiastically in 1800, on the occasion of his going into London to attend lectures on science, primarily to feast upon a new stock of metaphors.²⁰ He, like many of his fellow Romantics, sought to break into Science’s magic circle, be it fashioned by mathematicians or physicists, chemists or biologists. Far from ignoring the new truths of cosmology, they wanted to understand them. Of those nineteenth-century poets writing in English, for example, Lord Byron (1788–1824) was vitally interested in scientific matters, especially in astronomy and geology; so, too, was Robert Browning (1812–1889), who called Shelley “the Sun-treader” and commended him for his “Hymn to Apollo,” with its radiant sun god. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) did work as a chemist, introducing scientific references into such poems as “Queen Mab” and “Prometheus Unbound,” while in his “Hymn to Apollo” the god calls himself “the eye with which the universe / Beholds itself and knows itself divine.” John Keats (1795–1821), who studied medicine, regularly employs astronomical images, his long poems Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion both being named for the classical sun god.

Also Emerson, Holmes, Poe, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy (“The sun rested his chin upon the meadows”), Coventry Patmore, and Charles Dickens (often in the context of the weather in general, but with particular grimness in Bleak House and the opening chapter of Little Dorrit) wrote on specifically solar themes. Emily Dickinson even composed a poem that poked fun at the post-Copernican understanding of the cosmos: “The earth upon an axis / Was once supposed to turn,” runs her “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” “By way of a gymnastic / In honor of the sun!”

But the truth is that, for all their professed interest in science, from 1750 on, for almost 150 more years, when poets sat down to write, they continued to prefer the safer pastures of the old myths. The Sun was still decked out as Apollo, Helios, Hyperion, or Phoebus; its identity as a roiling ball of gases that was but one of many stars in the galaxy was not—yet—the stuff of poetry. Yet the new findings of science could not be ignored, and overall exerted what was thought to be a negative influence. Even Macaulay, who was to become the very apostle of progress, accepted the decline of poetry as the unavoidable result of scientific revelations, while Hegel argued that as societies advance in rational achievement, so they tend to lose those great skills that rest on imagination. By the turn of the century the great scholar of the classical world’s knowledge of the heavens was A. E. Housman (1859–1936). In old age, he wrote to The Times Literary Supplement: “Quintilian says you will never understand the poets unless you learn astronomy.”²¹ That may have been true of the ancients, Housman’s field of study, but not of his fellow poets.

Such a theory would have appealed strongly to D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), whose poem “Phoenix” explores just that idea. Lawrence brings the myth into his novels, and at one point he even adopted the bird as his personal symbol. He could be ridiculous and even repulsive (Bertrand Russell thought he heralded the Nazis, in his anti-Semitism and phallus-centered philosophy), but he did celebrate the Sun to memorable effect. His preoccupation began early (Nottingham, his birthplace, was a grimy coal-mining city) and endured throughout his life. The final page of his greatest novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), describes the night when Paul Morel comes to terms with having renounced his mistress and buried his mother:

Here, as always for Lawrence, the Sun is regenerative, its gold echoed in the phosphorescence of the city calling Morel back to life. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the short story “Sun,” a paean to its life-giving powers, which Harry Crosby’s Black Sun Press published in 1928. It tells of a refined New York lady dispatched to the Sicilian coast to recuperate from postpartum depression. “You know, Juliet,” her mother advises, “the doctor told you to lie in the sun, without your clothes. Why don’t you?” So she does, and soon the Sun is “gradually penetrating her to know her, in the cosmic carnal sense of the word,”²³ and is not to be denied. A local peasant, about her age, suddenly appears at the ravine close to her rented garden. His eyes meet hers …

Juliet is loath to make the first approach, and her admirer waits endlessly on her initiative with “the dogged passivity of the earth.” Into her sunny retreat arrives, unexpectedly, her husband, the “utterly sunless” Maurice, a man who is “the soul of gentle timidity in his human relations,” so that Juliet “being so sunned … could not see him, his sunlessness was like nonentity.” But she realizes that it is her gray spouse that she will have to settle for: “She had not enough courage, she was not free enough.” Even though her lust remains unconsummated, this story must rate as the purest expression of the erotic power of sun exposure in all literature.

In this final work, Lawrence urged mankind to reestablish its primal connection to the cosmos—without the mediation of science, or what he saw as its reductiveness. “Start with the sun and the rest will slowly, steadily happen,” he ends the book by saying.

An even more fervent apostle of the Sun (and not coincidentally a fan of Lawrence’s and fellow sun worshipper) was a millionaire American, a hedonist poet of the 1920s who died in a suicide pact at thirty-one—“a fugitive from a bad Scott Fitzgerald novel,” as one obituarist described him.²⁵ This is a theatrical way to reintroduce Harry Crosby, but everything about Crosby springs from the pages of melodrama. Both Malcolm Cowley, in Exile’s Return, and Geoffrey Wolff, in Black Sun, wrote at length about him, while to Paul Fussell he was “the ultimately mad American” whose life showed “the power of the sun to take over entirely a malleable mind.”²⁶ Crosby’s own writings—avant-garde, experimental, surreal, deeply off-putting—were supported by great wealth, wholly inherited and effectively multiplied by his living in Europe when the franc was very weak. The money also allowed him to refurbish a medieval mill (inevitably, “Le Moulin du Soleil”) outside Paris into a luxurious country house, travel to exotic destinations whenever he wished, experiment with photography, push his Bugatti to its limits, and even learn to fly solo at a time when the airplane was “a gadget so new … that no one had agreed on its spelling.”

Descended from old New England money (J. P. Morgan was an uncle), he enlisted in the Field Service Ambulance Corps early in the First World War, serving at Verdun and on the Somme, receiving the Croix de Guerre, and surviving a wound that should have killed him. After an “accelerated” degree at Harvard and a scandalous marriage to a woman six years his senior whom he induced to leave her husband, he settled in France, buying racehorses, sampling opium, drinking to excess, and traveling. And he started to write. In 1927 he launched the Black Sun Press, had a solar face tattooed on his back as an expression of devotion, and elicited his first short story from Lawrence, whom he paid in “sunny” twenty-dollar gold pieces.

By the mid-1920s Crosby had published an elaborate diary of the years 1922-26, Shadows of the Sun, as well as two volumes of poetry, the first entitled Chariot of the Sun. Other Black Sun projects included work by Hart Crane, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Man Ray. As a spotter of talent, Crosby was not without gifts.^*

By now he was interested in the philosophical applications of suicide, and indeed had been openly obsessing about death for at least five years (“Time is a tyranny to be abolished”). One last outré venture was called for. His second book of poetry, Transit of Venus, had been inspired by Josephine Rotch (newly Mrs. Albert Smith Bigelow), the woman with whom he would spend the last week of his life. On December 9, 1929, the day before they died, Josephine wrote Crosby a passionate verse letter that ends by insisting “that the Sun is our God / and that death is our marriage.”

The literature of almost every culture contains its share of solar allusions. Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) and Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), for instance, shared an ambivalence about the Sun. As the Verlaine scholar Martin Sorrell comments, “Where Rimbaud’s quest for a kind of cosmic revelation made him worship the sun’s power to absorb and take him over, Verlaine’s poems … reveal almost an equal fascination with the sun, but as a star whose force is shrouded, guarded, veiled and intangible. In a fascinating way, the two poets’ concern with the sun is the two sides of one coin.”³¹

For Rimbaud, who produced nearly all his best work before he was twenty, the Sun was either the unmasker of social evils or the bringer of misery. “The hearth of affection and life, it pours burning love on the delighted earth,” he wrote; but his last years were spent in the desert heat of East Africa, which seared him into a decidedly less receptive frame of mind. “I saw the low sun, stained with mystic horrors,” he confided wretchedly to a friend. “We’re in the steam-baths of springtime. Skins are dripping, stomachs turning sour, brains becoming muddled.”³² But in the end the Sun, “which shines like a scoured cauldron,”³³ won through, and on his deathbed he wept to his then companion, Isabelle, that never again would he feel its light. “I shall go under the earth, and you shall walk in the sun!”

Thinly veiled autobiography continued with the novels of André Gide (1869–1951), whose first book, The Immoralist (1902), is narrated by Michel, a scholar who spends his early years in northern France. He marries and honeymoons in North Africa—and finds his world changed. “I came to think it a very astonishing thing to be alive, that every day shone for me.” As it did for Lawrence, the Sun becomes a liberating power. Leaving his bride behind, Michael embarks on a Mediterranean adventure. Immediately drawn to the “beautiful, brown, sun-burned skins” of Italian boys, he is “shamed to tears” at his own whiteness and, opening his body to the Sun, sets about his transformation: “I exposed my whole body to its flame. I sat down, lay down, turned myself about.… Soon a delicious burning enveloped me: my whole being surged up into my skin.” Freed from restraint, he becomes the brown immoralist of the novel’s title. Oscar Wilde had once mentioned to Gide that the Sun hates or deters thought, and sure enough Michel is soon concluding that “existing is occupation enough.”³⁴

In L’Étranger (1944), Albert Camus has his protagonist Meursault kill a local North African on a blazingly hot beach, apparently for no reason—that being the point, and Unreason the name, that Camus attached to his sun-blasted Algerian experiences. Declaiming this philosophy in The Rebel (1953), he wrote: “Historic absolutism, despite its triumphs, has never ceased to come into collision with an irrepressible demand of human nature of which the Mediterranean, where intelligence is intimately related to the blinding light of the sun, guards the secret.” When Sartre was asked if Camus, a close friend, was also an existentialist, he replied, “No, that’s a grave misconception.… I would call his pessimism ‘solar,’ if you remember how much black there is in the sun.” Camus’s own comment was, “To correct a natural indifference I was placed halfway between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.”

What becomes clear is that by the mid-twentieth century the Sun could serve almost any literary purpose: symbol, metaphor, inspiration, dramatic force, intimate companion, intransigent adversary, comic butt, tragic endgame, source of redemption or of philosophical belief. Lolita is so remarkable because Nabokov makes use of the Sun in nearly all these ways.

And still the literary exploitation of the Sun goes on. In 2008 the American novelist Elizabeth Strout published Olive Kitteridge, thirteen interconnected stories about a retired teacher in the fictional coastal town of Crosby, Maine: it won a Pulitzer Prize. An extraordinarily perceptive narrative about love and acceptance, it does not use the Sun metaphorically the way that Nabokov does but as a presence—or absence—that affects everyone in Crosby, particularly the prickly, truculent Mrs. Kitteridge. Strout can be wonderfully observant about, say, “the abandonment of a sunbather,” or light emerging through the fog, or making a red glass on a bureau glow.³⁵ A strip of wooden floor shines “like honey” under “a block of winter sun,” while later the Sun lingers “across a snow-covered field and made it violet in color.” But it is more than that: in a short book, there are seventy solar references, with the Sun acting as a guide to character and to what characters should do. By the novel’s end, Olive, newly widowed, suddenly finds a local widower who seems to love her. Will she seize her chance? She is about to turn away when the Sun gives her “a sudden surging greediness for life.… She remembered what hope was, and this was it.… She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”

* Florence and Kenneth Wood, Homer’s Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded (London: John Murray, 1999). Johnston was born in 1916 and studied at Kansas State Teachers College, taking mythology as one of her special subjects and learning ancient Greek. Over the next three decades she read and reread the Iliad and the Odyssey until she could recite long passages from memory. At some point she made her discovery—she had no wish, she said, to diminish the poems as narratives, dense with well-drawn characters, convincing plots, “pathos, horror, excitement, calm; philosophy, history and so on” (p. 5), but she saw an overarching purpose in the two great works: to preserve astronomical knowledge. Fearing she might be out on a limb, she never made her findings public. After her death her daughter Florence and her son-in-law spent seven years editing and expanding the various notes until they could finally publish the results.

* More than four hundred years later, at least one major Greek dramatist was to make keen use of the Sun. Euripides has Orestes flee after killing his mother, Clytemnestra, and search out a place on which the Sun did not shine when he committed the deed, as a way of escaping the Furies; then, in The Bacchae, the young King Pentheus of Thebes is driven mad by Bacchus and sees two Thebes and two Suns. Fact came to mirror fiction when in 1783 the French Academy of Science sent a balloon up into the sky, its pilot becoming the first person known to history to see the Sun set twice in a single day—and finding it terrifying. See William Longyard, Who’s Who of Aviation History (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1994), p. 41.

* “Lucifer” (Light Bearer, with all its positive connotations) caused a special problem for early Christians. The name appears in the fourteenth chapter of the Old Testament book of Isaiah, verse 12—and nowhere else. It was popularized by its appearance in the King James translation, although it appears first in a fourth-century version. The explanation is that in the original Hebrew text, it is not an angel who falls, but a Babylonian king, who during his lifetime had persecuted the children of Israel; an early Christian scribe made the change.

* I have a soft spot for Suckling, for during his short life (1609–1642) he invented the game of cribbage.

* More, a longtime member of Parliament, in 1601 declared, during a debate on monopolies, “And therefore to think we can sufficiently record the same, it were to hold a candle before the Sun to dim the light.” In one of the small ironies of history, 250 years on, the French political economist Frédéric Bastiat famously reduced protectionism to an absurdity in “A Petition of the Candle-makers,” in which his candle makers petitioned to put out the Sun, as its radiance was bad for business.

* The Black Sun has other connotations. Russia’s great symbolist poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) records: “I have recalled the image of Pushkin’s burial [Pushkin fell in a duel in 1837] to arouse in your memory the image of a night Sun.”²⁸ This language recurs throughout Mandelstam’s Tristia (1922), with such lines as “for the mother in love / The Black Sun will rise.” The Sun’s role seems to vary, finally linking with the Christian apocalyptic tradition. The Black Sun image also connects with Mandelstam’s ambivalence about the Bolshevik Revolution, which he wanted to endorse but which seemed to be bringing in darkness, not light; it not only represents the death of specific people but becomes a symbol of Russia itself—the Sun as a force of despair.

CHAPTER 27 BUSIE OLD FOOLE

CHAPTER 27
BUSIE OLD FOOLE