The Shortest Day

by Colm Tóibín

A few times over the years, when he had bowed his head at the Consecration of the Host at Mass, he had realized how hard it would be for an archaeologist of the future, on finding the ruins of a Catholic church, to guess what the faithful had believed. The scholars would just have the arches, the pillars, the tiled floor, the outline of the building, perhaps some of the items used on the altar. But if they did not have the prayer books, then they would know nothing about the prayers that were said, or the rituals that were performed.

He looked at a drawing he had made of one of the spiral designs on a stone at Newgrange. It was so stark and pure. It could be a symbol of something, maybe time as circular and coiled, maybe the cycle of life, or the cycle of each day or the seasons. Who could tell what it meant? But it did reveal something that no archaeologist would be fully comfortable speculating about. It revealed an imagination that was both simple and sophisticated, that dealt in ambiguity and suggestion as well as clarity and directness. The professor was almost tempted to note that these people, if studied in the light of these designs on stone, knew something about what was palpable and also what was tangible: they knew about spirit, and they knew about line.

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.

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.