'The Order of the Tranquil Night'

“Sometimes a phrase or a verse you’ve read a hundred times over with indifference stirs an extraordinary fervor in you.” 

While thinking on Friday about the first anniversary of Terry Teachout’s death and the inconceivable premature deaths of other friends, I imperfectly remembered lines from Nabokov’s title poem in Pale Fire: “Life Everlasting--based on a misprint! / I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint / And stop investigating my abyss?” It was that final word that had anchored the lines for me: abyss. A chilling thought, nonexistence. John Shade had used the word earlier in “Pale Fire”:   

 

“And finally there was the sleepless night

When I decided to explore and fight

The foul, the inadmissible abyss,

Devoting all my twisted life to this

One task. Today I’m sixty-one. Waxwings

Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings.”

 

“Inadmissible.” Yes, that’s how it felt. A universe on two legs, talking, thinking, feeling – gone. Not missing or elsewhere – nonexistent. Yet Shade continues his research into life after death, prodded by the suicide of his daughter, Hazel Shade. The sentence quoted at the top is from Jean Guéhenno’s Diary of Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford University Press, 2014), translated by David Ball. It is the journal Guéhenno kept while living in Paris during the German occupation. The passage from October 25, 1942 continues: “That’s what happened to me yesterday when I read this hemistich by Lucretius: ‘. . . Noctes vigilare serenas.’” The Latin tag from De Rerum Natura means “to stay awake through clear nights.” Guéhenno continues:

 

“These words were enough to make me happy all evening. Those great, long, exalted nights you spend reading when you’re twenty [Guéhenno was fifty-two], on watch in the silence and the darkness with all the great order of stars around you, that hope, that expectation, that awareness . . . And the finest moment is when, with the help of a kind of tired drunkenness, it seems to you that the order of the tranquil night has become the actual order of your mind, the light in its rank among the lights.”

 

Guéhenno quotes Lucretius’ words again and adds: “And then the sirens howled out the air-raid warning.”

 

I’m reading Guéhenno’s diary thanks to Isaac Waisberg, who maintains a sort of digital commonplace book and a library of books in pdf format, including Theodor Haecker’s Journal in the Night.