The Shortest Day

by Colm Tóibín

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. They had sought to work with that strangeness so that death, when it came, would be less alien to them. They became fascinated by angles of elevation, by the rays that light could make, by weight and stress, by lines cut into stone. They had loved making carvings on stones that would face inward and would never be seen. They would be studied by the dark itself, as though it were a living thing, and for them, the purpose of life slowly became a way of not being afraid of the dark.

This made me cry. I can’t believe I picked up this story today. I had no idea how accurate this would be to my own thoughts and those that Justin would understand. This author just gets it.