"my lonely bones will drown"
These are the beautiful closing bars of Night Thoughts:
[First voice]
In the gardens of the Night, breathed on by newly freshened air, wrapped in the sheltering arms of shadows cast by slowly growing things, the consolation of profound Serenity is to be found. Here, in forgetting by degrees the crude immediacies of day, talk’s trivialities, the well-worn props and tokens of habitual routine, it is possible to recall to mind and to draw near again to something vastly fundamental, self-effacingly withdrawn, that is lying there and is there all the time. It is an ever-new discovery to find it still awaiting our return, unsmiling, taciturn, yet limitlessly tolerant and all-comprehending, ready to take us back into obscurity, to share with us its poverty, to close and soothe our eyes.
[Second Voice]
The Earth, Nature, Unconsciousness and Death. We are drawn down and back towards them in the Night. But there is Vigil where the walker in the garden stands and wonders in the dark.
[First Voice]
Now the man who spoke aloud just now out of his dark into the darkness: (to no one? To someone? The mystery is not mine to solve that each must face alone) the man who has said: ’I could not cry if I were in despair’, turns presently towards the lighted windows he had left behind him earlier, and slowly makes his way back through the scented plants and dangling leaves of the dumbly sleeping garden to his wife and home, his books and bed.
[Second voice]
And as he goes, begins to realize that something has changed in him. The open air, the space about him had first stirred his heart, he lifted up his heart and it had opened, and the wind that blows when it will and comes from nowhere that we know and passes on as unaccountably, had inspired it with its own more vital, lighter, unrestricted and revivifying breath. Silence had delivered its essential message to him, and he had responded. Now he feels he no longer has the need to reassure himself with words.
[Third Voice]
He goes back to his house, he returns to his wife and children. The children have long been asleep upstairs. His wife is sitting where he left her, under the reading lamp. She closes her book as he enters, looks up at her husband and smiles slowly at him, sleepily. He kisses her.
[First Voice]
They are together. The primary division of the human family at night is that which sets those who are alone apart from those who are together. And yet all are alone, as the man realised earlier in the garden; and all those who are isolated in their solitude are really alone only because they do not realize the presence of other human beings like themselves in the world.
[Second Voice]
Greetings to the solitary. Friends, fellow beings, you are not strangers to us. We are closer to one another than we realise. Let us remember one another at night, even though we do not know each other’s names.
Last edited by Steve Bucknell; 12-03-2011 at 09:31 AM.
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