More than that-I believe that art and literature offer us things of unique necessity to get us through these nights. I chose to share Through the Night with you all because I know that at some point we all must experience our own long, dark night, and it is my belief that literature offers so much of importance at this moment. Closer to our own era, Elie Wiesel titled his work about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald Night-the first book in a trilogy that moves from darkness to Dawn and Day as he attempts to put the Holocaust behind him. It is as old as the Bible: Jacob’s struggle with the angel, dating from the 7th century BC, is one of the strangest and most challenging moments in all of Western literature, and it is certainly a foundational story of the Western imagination. Given its universality and its potency, the idea of the long night one must suffer through is a powerful literary trope. Even as an adult, though I no longer believe in bogeymen waiting to get me when I go to sleep, I often find snapping awake in a pitch black room in the wee hours an unnerving, uncanny experience. As children, most of us instinctively fear the dark and worry about monsters under the bed.
Nighttime is one of the most primal, fearsome things that we have to confront on an everyday basis. Today, Stig Saeterbakken helps us get through the long, dark night of the soul.
In his new column, Scott Esposito will be revealing works of art-books, film, music-that can serve to remind us of the essential force of the humanities in any civilization worth saving.
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