{"id":117867,"date":"2017-11-08T13:00:52","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T18:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=117867"},"modified":"2026-03-16T11:53:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T15:53:30","slug":"dark-feels-different-november","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/dark-feels-different-november\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dark Feels Different in November"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second\u00a0installment of Nina<\/em>\u00a0MacLaughlin\u2019s Novemberance<\/a> column, which will run every Wednesday this month.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Godfried Schalcken,\u00a0Young Girl with a Candle<\/em>\u00a0(detail), <\/em> 1670\u20131675.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m in the November of my life,\u201d said Francesca, a fifty-eight-year-old curator with good shoulders and dark lively eyes and dark wavy hair and a laugh that came from deep in her gut. Two years ago, she was told she had two-and-a-half years to live. \u201cThis was my relationship with death before,\u201d she said, holding her arms apart at full wingspan. \u201cKnew it would happen. Never thought about it.\u201d Then she brought her index fingers together so they touched in front of her chest. \u201cThis was the diagnosis.\u201d Death was on top of her. The stamp of an expiration date on her forehead annihilated all other thought. In time, and with titanic mental effort, the initial all-consuming horror gave way. \u201cIn November, you\u2019re winding down,\u201d she said. \u201cIt means incorporating less sharp edges, more smoke.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is maybe to say more mystery, more potential. The sharp edges of fact give way to the blur of the question mark, the uncertainty, the quiet. \u201cThe space of nothingness is where one finds his or her own self and life\u2019s richness,\u201d writes the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. \u201cThis is a wonderful time of my life,\u201d Francesca said.<\/p>\n

Francesca talked of her career as a curator, and the importance of \u201cthe space of nothingness,\u201d how the gap between the works of art was as important to her as the works themselves. \u201cEvery inch mattered,\u201d she said. She spoke of the sweet spot, a placement wherein two objects are in tension, in conversation, put at a distance that allows one to see the most of both at once. \u201cThere\u2019s a perfect distance where empty space allows both to be alive in a different way,\u201d she said. \u201cDo you know the Japanese concept of ma<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ma<\/em> loosely translates to negative space, to emptiness, vacancy, blankness. It is a pause, in time, space, music, conversation. \u201cMa <\/em>makes nothingness palpable and tangible,\u201d writes Ando. It\u2019s a space ripe with an atmosphere of uncertainty, suspension, and possibility. The Japanese character consists of the graphic for door and for moon, suggesting \u201ca door through the crevice of which the moonshine peeps in,\u201d as the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren defines it in his Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese<\/em>. Ma <\/em>is the crack that lets the light in.<\/p>\n

In his slim book In Praise of Shadows<\/em>, Jun\u2019ichir\u014d Tanizaki writes of seeing light in darkness. He writes of a large room lit by candles and tries to describe the color of that particular sort of darkness. He calls it \u201ca pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.\u201d The particles collect in a way that\u2019s all potential, into a<\/p>\n

\u201cvisible darkness,\u201d where always something seemed to be flickering and shimmering, a darkness that on occasion held greater terrors than darkness out of doors. This was the darkness in which\u00a0ghosts and monsters were active.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That quality doesn\u2019t exist in small rooms lit by bulbs turned on with a flick of a switch. Tanizaki laments the extinction of a darkness that helps the mind see ghosts, that edges one up against the vast, the frightening, the nonunderstandable. The candlelight makes one better know the dark, the shadows, the spaces unseen. And the dark\u2014the hollows and corners behind the curtains, above the rafters, the places where dimness pools\u2014helps one better know the light.<\/p>\n

Likewise, ma <\/em>makes one aware of the presence of absence. It\u2019s the gap where the moonlight sifts through; it\u2019s the space between two slate stones that guide your steps along a path; it\u2019s the hollow where ghosts gather; it\u2019s the pause in conversation, the ripe silence of the unspoken.<\/p>\n

Jeanette Winterson writes of the relationship between light and conversation:<\/p>\n

I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing\u2014their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling\u2014their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less. There are longer pauses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Certain kinds of dark allow us to be more at home with silence. An upped intimacy results. Night grows in November. It gets dark in November. We can quiet down in November. In the long evenings, embrace the pause, the fertile quiet. From the first of the month to the thirtieth, in a small city in the northeast, night extends by fifty-nine minutes. It\u2019s not the month that loses the most light though. September and October get darker by far, each losing about eighty-three minutes of light. Even August, when the fireflies throb by the bushes at the edge of the yard and you still don\u2019t need sleeves or shoes, loses more light than November by more than fifteen minutes. But the dark feels different in November.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s in large part due to daylight saving time. On Sunday, unless you live in Arizona, you bumped back the clocks, which means an hour of light that belonged to the evening now belongs to the morning. For many, that hour-earlier sunset is an abrupt reminder that winter is on top of us, that time is only ever running out. For those who prefer the lengthened twilights of summer, the afternoon dark carries with it a sense of gloom, a lethargy, a melancholy, a despair. At two in the morning on a Sunday in November, the slow creep of shifting minutes of light across the year accelerates all at once.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a power to it: it\u2019s the one day a year you can pick an hour to relive. Turning the clock back an hour sounds like a shoe dropped on a rug, a thud, abrupt, echoless, and then back to silence. It sounds like a candle being blown out, that quick canvas thwap of flame extinguished off a wick. The smoke rises in silence, the flame\u2019s ghost on its way elsewhere, and suddenly, sooner than you think, it gets dark.<\/p>\n

November holds\u00a0the in-between. Between warmth and cold, between light and dark, between living and dying. The eleventh month, getting darker, getting colder, echoes our own eventual winding down and gives chance to live in the richest, deepest way. \u201cThe space of nothingness is where one struggles to reach a deeper layer of self,\u201d writes Ando. November opens a path to those deeper layers unavailable to us during the rest of the year. It\u2019s an approximation of the expiration date stamped on our foreheads.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen death is right here,\u201d said Francesca, her index fingers held up together, side by side and touching, \u201cit eliminates everything else.\u201d She kept her fingers pressed together. \u201cWhen you are thinking too much about death, you are not experiencing the ma<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

She spread her arms wide again. \u201cAnd when it\u2019s right here,\u201d she said, fingers apart again at full wingspan, \u201cwhen you\u2019re not thinking at all about death, you are also not experiencing the ma<\/em>, and you take everything for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n

She moved her fingers back together, keeping them four and a half inches apart. \u201cHere, though. Here,\u201d she said, and paused, and quiet filled the room.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Novemberance here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second\u00a0installment of Nina\u00a0MacLaughlin\u2019s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month.\u00a0   \u201cI\u2019m in the November of my life,\u201d said Francesca, a fifty-eight-year-old curator with good shoulders and dark lively eyes and dark wavy hair and a laugh that came from deep in her gut. Two years ago, she was told […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2669,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31427],"tags":[31600,31599,27789,2186,31601,9414,1709,31596,9075,31597,31598],"class_list":["post-117867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-novemberance","tag-analytic-dictionary-of-chinese-and-sino-japanese","tag-bernhard-kalgren","tag-daylight-saving-time","tag-death","tag-in-praise-of-shadows","tag-jeannette-winterson","tag-junichiro-tanizaki","tag-ma","tag-november","tag-novemberance","tag-tadao-ando"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Dark Feels Different in November<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It\u2019s the presence of absence, the gap where the moonlight sifts through. 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