Findings

The sea and its surf is never far away, constant Atlantic soughing, a sense that the land is an interruption in a long conversation between water and sky.

[context: talking about the Hebridean island of Coll]

They say the day is coming—it may already be here—when there will be no wild creatures. That is, when no species on the planet will be able to further itself without reference or negotiation with us. When our intervention or restraint will be a factor in their continued existence. Every creature: salmon, sand martins, seals, flies.

He could tell a bird by a mark, a piped note, an attitude in the air. When I marveled at this, he said identifying a bird was similar to making a poem or a finished piece of work from the kind of notes I stopped to make in my book, crouched down out of the wind.

When I want to know a thing, I resort to books and feel strangely exposed without books to fall back on, as though standing on a ledge. I must just learn to be patient, learn to observe first-hand.

The hallway of our friend’s cottage was inviting in candlelight, as was the room, and the table. The curtains were open to show the black night pressed against the windows. We were merry company, and in the warm candlelight we enjoyed a half joking, symbolic meal. We at stuffed red peppers, to symbolize, our host said, the rising sun. Sauteed carrot sticks were its warming rays, and green beans, presented with a flourish, represented the shoots of spring. We cheered the beans, and drank a toast because tonight was midwinter’s night, the night of the complicit kiss, and tomorrow the light would begin it’s return.

I was saying that the dark, the natural, courteous dark, was too much maligned and, frankly, I blamed Christians. The whole idea wanted refreshing. We couldn’t see the real dark for the metaphorical dark. Because of the metaphorical dark, the death dark, we were constantly concerned to banish the natural dark. Enough of this “Don’t let the sun go down on me” stuff.

I imagined traveling into the dark. Northward — so it got darker as I went. I’d a notion to sail by night, to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy. I had been asking around among literary people, readers of books, for instances of dark as a natural phenomenon, rather than as a cover for all that’s wicked, but could find few. It seems to me that our cherished metaphor of darkness is wearing out.

…

Pity the dark: we’re so concerned to overcome and banish it, it’s crammed full of all that’s devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair. But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in the darkness, are we not? … Our vocabulary ebbs with the daylight, closes down with the cones of our retinas. I mean, I looked up darkness on the web—and was offered Christian ministries offering to lead me to salvation. And there is always death. We day death is darkness; and darkness death.

Quietly, though, like a coded message, an invitation arrive to a meal to celebrate the winter solstice. Only six people would be there, and no electric light.