Of Dusk

The pallid sun turns icy grey as it slowly burns itself in the western sky. Everything comes to a standstill, waiting. The sky is a starless blank, stretched like the dead skin of an animal, over a hollow. It resounds. Down there in the streets, the growing dark perpetrates a silence lulling everyone to surrender, to confront that certain future. Only the blue wind moans as it roams the landscape in its futile search for something, it knows not what itself. The grey pine trees dance in slow movements in the heavens, whistling an old song. It is familiar.

A raven watches over from the branches of a pine tree. Its occasional shrieks shatter every surviving vestige of desire, easing the burden of ambition, the burden of life. A decrepit man stands at the brink of a vast abyss unable to turn away as he gazes into its depths. Behind him, the echoes of life are still lingering, still calling onto him. It is futile. Slowly, they too surrender to the quiet. Even the raven song is slowly silence.

Now as the sky, suffused with a quiet darkness glides over the head of this man, he sees the truth. It had always been there, obscured yet impaling him. But the love of lies had kept it out of sight; had made its presence feeble. That murky love was poison, flooding his heart with desires and purposes that grew violent with time but then with time it slowly quietened into a whisper and then it faded into the firmament. That murky love was deception. And yes it had given him pleasure and it had given him purpose for in those days he had been sheltered and he had had companions who shared such pleasures, such purposes. Life had been grand, both in misery and in happiness. He was the centre of everything; the universe churned around him, the stars and the sun revolved around him and in them all were embedded divine powers that were for him, that were him. They spun around him with such great speed and such grandeur; he lost himself in them and then in himself, never once realising that there could be something else at the end of his universe. But then all grandeur is ephemeral; his universe grew out of control; soon it had no place for its own centre. He was banished from that which was his.

In that abyss, he sees with blank eyes, perplexed, the truth behind those youthful imaginings. That truth is one and the same for all and yet no one knows it truly till the time comes. What that truth holds is unfathomable to all regions of the mind, for it is beyond the mind’s grasp; the heart is but a hindrance as long as it beats. The truth never did reside in its chambers. The mind is a vast terrain, enclosed by the highest mountains that no individual dares to climb in his lifetime. Thus as long as breath visits his breast, he will not know what lies beyond these walls. It is only in the end when he sheds everything but himself, can he rise unburdened above the tyranny of his own mind, amplified in the emptiness of the heart. Only then will he see what he must see.

This is the aphelion of the world. This is where all that we know begins to end; where hope and despair erode into mere words. Here, the powerful and the weak are the same - mortals in the mouth of a reigning oblivion. The light is most faint and it grows weaker. The old man stares into the bottomless dark; unthinking, he merely is. He is living, yet no hollow heart beats in him; no breath trespasses what is his. He is living, and yet without desire, without what we all call life. He is content merely staring into a vast nothingness, where there is neither ecstasy nor agony, there is no triumph and there is no defeat; no hope, no fear. Nothingness is beyond space and time; soon it envelops him and he becomes what he sees. This nothingness is a stillness that is certain after the turbulence of life. It is a rest and no one gets tired of true rest.