|
Matthew Stover's Darkness |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The dark is generous.
Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark be-
neath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But
the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but
in hiding us from the truths of others.
The dark protects us from what we dare not know.
Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentile dreams
in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what
would repel in day’s harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the
illusion that the dark is temporary: that every night brings a new
day. Because it is a day that is temporary.
Day is the Illusion.
Its third gift is light itself: as days are defined by the nights
that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through
which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth
from the center of its own self.
With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.
The dark is generous, and it is patient.
It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt
into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.
The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will
cause those seeds to sprout.
The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the
soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits
behind the star that gives them light.
The dark’s patience is infinite.
Eventually, even the stars burn out.
The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere.
It is the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on
the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the
sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun and the dark is with you,
attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.
The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins—but
in the hearth of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough
to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.
--Matthew Stover
|
|
|
|
|
|
