The Long Dark

There is a stretch of the year, up here, when the dark stops being a thing that happens at the end of the day and becomes the condition the day happens inside. It comes on gradually through the autumn and then all at once you notice it: it is dark when you wake, and it is dark, fully dark, by four in the afternoon, and the light in between is thin and grey and low-angled and gone almost before it arrives, and you spend the productive hours of your life going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark with a brief pallid interval of not-quite-day in the middle. The long dark. Everyone who lives far enough north knows it, and knows the particular weight it puts on a person, and knows too that you are not supposed to complain about it too much, because it is just winter, and everyone is under the same low sky.

But it is worth naming plainly, because it is real and it is physical and it is not a weakness to feel it: the long dark presses down. There is a lowering that comes with the loss of the light, a slowing, a pull toward sleep and silence and the inside of the house, a mood that settles over a whole region at once. We have clinical language for it now, and the language is useful and true — the light genuinely regulates the body’s chemistry, and its long absence genuinely alters mood, and some people are flattened by it in ways that deserve real care and not a brisk cheer up. But under the clinical language is something older and shared, a thing every northern people has always known: that when the light goes, something in the human animal goes down with it, and that the darkest months are a season to be endured, gotten through, survived until the light turns and comes back.

The fires we light against it

And here is the thing I love, the thing that turns the long dark from mere hardship into something almost tender: the way people answer it. Because we do not simply submit to the dark. We light things against it, and we always have, and the lighting is one of the oldest and most touching of human reflexes. Notice when the festivals of light fall — right at the bottom of the year, clustered around the longest nights, in nearly every northern culture, wholly independent of one another: fires lit, candles set in windows, lamps and strings of light strung up against the exact darkness that is pressing hardest. This is not a coincidence and it is not really about any one religion. It is the human animal, at the darkest point of the year, refusing the dark by making small deliberate fires — insisting, with a candle in a window, that the light has not entirely gone, that we can make a little of our own, that we will get through to the other side. The festivals of light are, at bottom, a communal act of morale, a whole civilization agreeing to put lamps in the windows precisely when the nights are longest, so that no one has to look out at unbroken darkness.

And it works, in its small way, which is the moving part. The candle does not lengthen the day. The string of lights does nothing to the sky. But a lit window in the four-o’clock dark of December is a genuine comfort, to the one inside it and to the stranger walking past — a small human fire held up against the enormous indifferent dark, saying someone is here, someone is warm, the light is not all gone. We cannot defeat the long dark; it will run its full course, and the sun will keep its own schedule regardless of us. But we can answer it, and the answering is not futile, because it was never meant to change the weather — it was meant to change the people, to get them through, to hold the collective spirit up through the worst of the dark by the simple stubborn act of making light where there isn’t any. The lamps are for us, not the night.

The turn that always comes

What gets a person through the long dark, in the end, is the one thing about it that is absolutely reliable: it turns. There is a bottom to it — the solstice, the shortest day — and after the bottom, the light comes back, minute by minute at first, imperceptibly, and then unmistakably, the afternoons stretching a little, the dark loosening its grip, the sun climbing higher, until one day in the late winter you walk out of work and there is still light in the sky and something in your chest lifts that you did not know had been pressed down. The long dark always ends. It has never once failed to end. And the knowledge that it will end is, I think, the deepest resource we have against it — not the candles, though the candles help, but the plain astronomical certainty that the light is coming back, that this is the bottom and not the whole, that the year turns and always has.

I have made a kind of peace with the long dark, the way you make peace with anything that comes every year and cannot be argued with. I light the lamps early. I keep a candle going on the worst afternoons, not for any reason I could defend, except the oldest one, the one in the blood — that a small fire against the dark is a comfort out of all proportion to its size, and that lighting it puts me in company with every person who ever set a light in a window at the bottom of the year and waited for the sun to come back. It is only weather. It presses down, and then it turns, and the light returns, as it was always going to. And in the meantime we do the human thing, the small stubborn thing, the thing that never fixed the darkness and never stopped: we make our little fires, and we hold on, and we wait for the light, together, under the same low sky.