The Shortest Day

by Colm Tóibín

They appreciated the light all the more because it came only once a year, at a time when the darkness they lived in was at its most unforgiving and impenetrable. The faintest stirring first, and then something like a sound, and then an echo. And then, as though time were ready to begin all over again, a shaft of sunlight, thick with yellowness and fine particles of dust. This ray, growing brighter, let them know how dense the dark had been up until then.

And some among them protested this was talking about a past that had not really existed. They had never been warriors, they insisted, even though they knew how to defend themselves and how to attack. It was not what they did in war that made them proud of their past, they said. It was what they had done in peace. It was the art they made, the homage they paid to mystery and beauty. They offered tribute to strangeness because it was strangeness that they appreciated most in the world when they were alive. They saw the world’s meaning as beyond their grasp, and they relished not understanding it. They saw each other as creatures not to be easily known.

Thus, it was the strangeness of the night sky and the seasons that they loved and missed, the strangeness of fire and water, the strangeness they noted in each other.

In their excitement, they demanded that all stories told in the future be true, even the ones that were made up. A few of them were brave enough to ask that, for the sake of variety, some new stories be added to the old ones, or some of the old ones be given new endings.