Don't be afraid of the Dark.

I continue to be inspired by Virginia Woolf whose work I dip into when I want some new light on old perceptions. Today, thanks to the marvels of Google, I came across an article about her by Rebecca Solnit in the New Yorker 2014. She focuses, for a start, on Woolf's comment: 

“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think,”

It isn't a statement that has come from a negative mood but is a positive reflection on what the dark - or unknowingness - has to offer us. Humans beings tend to want to know everything, to understand, to have rational explanations for their world. The darkness, real and figurative, is scary. The French call dusk the time “entre le chien et le loup,” between the dog and the wolf, between the tamed and the wild, the unpredictable, the dangerous. It is also a time of merging, love making, new beginnings, enchantment and mystery.

John Keats, after a walk with friends, made the following observation about his thoughts during that walk: “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature.… I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Thinking we know or understand what is happening in the present, because we refer each moment to experiences in our past, can blind us to new realities. It is said that the greatest discoveries have been made by people who are capable of looking at things without preconceptions. 

Lawrence Gonzales says: 'It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.' 

I find that hard, if not impossible. And that's why I need VW who seems to have that faculty. She celebrates the darkness as she walks the London streets when everything is unclear, is denied definition. And she argues with those who believe introspection is best indulged indoors, a solitary experience like that of monk in his cell, the writer at her desk. Woolf disagrees especially with the supposition that staying at home in isolated peace can bring new insight.  “For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.” Going out into the anonymity of a city street at night will active much more. “….when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!”

I have Virginia Woolf and Rebecca Solnit to thank for this morning's new horizons.