Modes of the night
There is a kind of night one can never really see through. It is the lightless light of the room, that lies beyond everything else, the light which makes the darkness, and makes all the shadow things come to lurk and prowl in it.
There are times when things in the dark come to you. They are not really there when you see them. They are only a possibility in a room where there is no light.
The things you can see through darkness are what you can see when you have enough light. But the light you have to bring to bear on what is dark has to be as pure a light as you can possibly make. It has to be something that the darkness will not just let go through, not just accept as a shadow, not just give its space and shape and mass to.
To use the most simple and direct word, the light has to be something you can illuminate. There is a subtle and complex difference between shining a lamp light through a window and merely shining a room light through the window of a house. It is the difference between simply looking out a window and actually seeing. It is the difference between seeing what is inside a room by light from a window and actually seeing the room as it is.
It is the difference between looking out the window and seeing a house.
There is a word for this kind of light. It is called the true light. No light is pure. Every pure light that ever shone has been corrupted and perverted. No pure light exists. Pure light is like water, or like a flame, or like solar light. You must add to it some kind of other light, something that has a very specific quality that the pure light lacks, to get real light. The pure light without the pure light of another quality is like the pure water without some other liquid, like the pure fire without some other flammable substance.
It is like the difference between the true flame and a candle flame. The true flame has all the fire of the pure flame, of the fire burning alone. The true flame is the pure light plus another pure light in the form of the pure fire. If the pure light of the true flame were not pure, there would be no true flame. The true flame is like the pure flame without the pure flame of the fire in it.
The room does not have true light. The room has something else, that has the light of the pure light, and is not true light. The room is like a candle flame. The room is like a flame that burns something else. The room is like the true flame, but there is no flame that can burn the true flame.
There is no way to have the kind of light needed to illuminate a room except for the light the room itself brings with it. If you want to see with the lights of a house, a house cannot give you more light than that. You can’t add the right kind of light and take the wrong kind of light. Either a house is a true light or it is some other light.
Sometimes, when one is alone with a night, when the light of the room is not the room’s own light, the room will come to the one who is alone with it. It appears in the room, an old familiar thing. It appears with the air, the light of the room, still and silent. It comes to say, “The night is not really night. The night is the night. It is true night. It is real night.”
Sometimes, when you go out at night, the world can be something other than real night.
The other world is the world that is out of the door. The other world is in the dark. The other world is night. The other world is the pure light that cannot be illuminated.
The other world, that is out of the door, is the world of shadow and shadow. It is the world of nothingness. It is the night that is real night.
The world in the dark is the world that is only a possibility. It is the dark that is real darkness. It is the shadow world that is the dark, that is real shadow.
The shadow world is the shadow world.
In the dark, when you walk through it, you can walk with the shadows. You can walk at night with the shadows, and when you are done, they are still with you.
Shadows are the only thing in the dark. The dark is not something you can move around inside of, but it is everywhere in the dark. It is not nothing, but it is something. Shadows are not like a world, where there are places and there are people and there is space. Shadows are a nothingness that has all the spaces, and all the people, and all the emptyness of space. Shadows are there when there are no people, and when there are no spaces, and the spaces and the people and the nothingness are all there all the same. Shadows are the shadows of the shadow world.
“The shadows are the shadows of the world of the shadows.”
“Yes, yes,” I said. It was always easy to talk about the shadow world. You had to make it simple. You had to find the simplest words you could. I went out into the dark.
“I saw you go,” said the shadow that had been the shadow of me.
I said, “The shadows go. The shadows go.”
I was not talking to the shadow. I was not looking at the shadow. The shadow moved. I moved away from it. It did not follow me. It said, “It was you.”
I said, “It was you who did it.”
“No.”
“I saw you.”
“You saw me.”
“Yes.”
“What’s it matter?”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t think I can tell you why it matters to me.”
“Can I make you tell me?”
“Go on.”
“Is this it?”
“Tell me something new.”
“I could kill myself right now. You saw me go, and you never told me about it. I could do it right now. You never mentioned it.”
“We were friends,” said the shadow of the shadows.
“Yes.”
“We were.”
I stood there, in the dark, in the cold, in the empty cold, and felt, in some way that could not be explained in simple terms, my way out of this. “We were,” I said.
The shadows made a gesture with one of their many arms and one of the shadows fell to the ground in front of me. I was not looking at it. I did not even notice it. My way out was that simple.
I made a light. I made a light. I put it on the table. The light was the light of a true light, with a shape like the room, and it had a place and a person like the room. I made the light, and I saw the dark. I looked through the light, and saw the dark. I stood in the dark, and I saw the shadows.
I looked through the light, and I saw the dark. I could not see them. I made a






