Sun After Dark Read Free

Himalaya, the first touch of winter bringing an edge of chill, a sense of dark, to the afternoons, and all I can think of, on occasion, is the end of Shakespeare’s early comedy
Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Berowne has charmed himself and us with his flights of fancy, and he is minutes away from escorting his paramour offstage, as comedy decrees, when suddenly a messenger appears, in black, out of nowhere. The princess’s father—he begins. Is dead, she says, knowing what he will say before he says it. Moments before its culmination, the comedy is upended, and everything is left wide open.
    If he would truly have her hand, his love now says, turning to Berowne—though they had been about to walk off together, into a happy ending—he must take himself away from her for a year. To let Time try him, in part—to outstay the impatience of his youth—but also to see how his love of words can help the “groaning wretches” and “speechless sick” of an infirmary.
    “To move wild laughter in the throat of death?” he says. That’s hardly possible. In that case, she responds, what use are any of his words? Either he must forswear his language, or find a tonic use for it.
    I walk through the chill, sharp streets, the sky quite cloudless, the leaves turning, and what I see is what the play is saying, in a different key: everything falls away from us—the light, the dark, the warm afternoons—and all we can do is cry out in affirmation of our joy.

SUN AFTER DARK
I will visit a place entirely other than myself. Whether it is the future or the past need not be decided in advance.
    —SUSAN SONTAG

A GATHERING AROUND A PERPLEXITY
    In the falling mountain darkness, I pull my car off the high winding road, into a rough parking lot, and a man comes out to greet me: an older man, stooped a little and shaven-headed, in tattered black gown and woolen cap and glasses. He extends a hand, gives me a bow and, picking up my case, leads me off to a cabin. He worries about my “long drive,” asks if I’ll be okay here, heats up a pot of tea and slices some fresh bread for me. As night falls, he tells me to feel at home and says he knows a young woman he thinks I should be married to.
    Then, since I will need some special clothes to join him in the austerities for which he has invited me, he leads me, this Old Testament gentleman, off into the chill, unlit night, to collect a gown and cap and pair of canvas sneakers for me. His home is a markedly simple place, a small black welcome mat outside its door. Inside are a narrow single bed, a tiny mirror, a dirty old carpet, and some puppies cavorting under the legend “Friends Are All Welcome.”
    Farther inside, a pair of scissors, a few Kleenexes, a small shoulder bag with a Virgin Airlines tag attached to it, and, on a chest of drawers, a menorah. “This place is really quite a trip,” he tells me, smiling. “You enter a kind of science-fiction universe, which has no beginning and no end.” His own ragged gown, I notice, is held together with safety pins. The small Technics synthesizer in the next room is unplugged.
    Leading me out into the dark, he climbs a steep path to where there are tall pine trees, and the outline of monks in the distance, a thousand stars. We slip into a cold, empty room, and he gives me instructions on how to sit. “The bottom half— the legs—should be really strong,” he says. “The rest should be fluid.”
    Then, assessing my posture as serviceable, he leads me out into the mountain dark and into the
zendo,
or meditation hall, next door. Thirty or so figures, all in black, are sitting stock-still in the night. They are in the throes of a winter retreat,
rohatsu,
in which they will sit like this, all but uninterruptedly, for seven days. Monks patrol the aisles with sticks, ready to hit anyone who threatens to drop off. Every forty-five minutes or so, the practitioners are allowed to break from their
zazen
positions to relieve themselves in buckets in the