Black Sun

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
------Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon

After those insipid, languid summer days, brimming with light and frivolity, autumn finally emerged like a sail boat beyond the horizon or like a sigh of relief. The great tree grew dark and heavy with the rain and the rough, unhewn stones once again seemed to resume their eternal life under the watchful black clouds. And occassionally the sun's brilliant light would burst through and illuminate the vertical sheets of silvery rain so that the whole scene was quite unreal; it was as if nature, tired of the monotony and regularity of the seasons, had decided to display a full-hand with an exuberance and dazzling style that underlied the abundance and sheer range of all her possibilities.

In England one often has such spectacles before the end of the day but they never last for more than tewnty minutes. Before the earth regains her composure and tranquility and the slow seepage of reality starts, before all of the birds have made their way home, the light will flare up like this, so that the shadows will seem more real, hauntingly so, than all the objects in the world. And one is not sure if it is morning or evening.

The swami looked troubled by this, thrown off kilter, as if she had just seen an solar eclipse. It is morning, it is night; it is the same sky that we look at. But if you are young you view such a scene with hope, knowing that the sun will come to fill the day; if you are old, then this very same sky will fill you with dread as you come to realise that everything is quietly slipping back into darkness and the unknown.

Half of me longed for those blazoned summer days, null, meaningless even, but deathless....