Comes the Dawn

[If you’re a regular reader here, you may recall this post from a couple weeks ago, co-written with my co-blogger. In which case, you may be wondering, What about Part 2? Patience, patience. Gargoyles celebrate Xmas for — guess what? — twelve of our days.* Part 2 of “A Gargoyle Looks at Xmas” will probably be up this Thursday.]

Yeah, “Comes the dawn. Also “A light bulb went on over my head”; “Eureka!”; “Now I get it…!” The slap-in-the-forehead moment that we literary types sometimes call… epiphany.

Writerly-advice gurus, agents, and editors will often tell you — rightly — that forms of the word “sudden” are overused, because most often things just happen at their normal rate. A “sudden” occurrence is more likely one which has been taking place all along; it just took someone a long time to notice.

But epiphanies and suddenness go hand-in-hand. There’s a slow but steady accretion of evidence which eventually reaches critical mass and explodes like a fireball in a character’s head: the flashpoint is the epiphany.

(The word’s roots are Greek, literally translating as “a showing forth.”)

One of my favorite short-story endings is the one from James Joyce’s “The Dead.” The story appears in Joyce’s collection Dubliners, and (like the others in the same book) hinges on an epiphany of some sort in at least one character. (The action in “The Dead” takes place mostly at a party celebrating — surprise! — the Feast of the Epiphany, which occurs — surprise again! — on January 6 of every year.)

In the story, the protagonist — Gabriel — has just heard his wife Gretta confess, apparently, that she has spent her whole life thinking about, perhaps pining for and even loving another man. Or rather, another male — one Michael Furey, who died at age 17. “I think he died for me,” Greta says. She had been about to enter the convent, and sent him away from her window; he died a week later. And then:

“O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!”

She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.

Gretta falls asleep, and Gabriel watches her for a few moments. The story concludes:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

(The whole story is online here and elsewhere.)

And, not in the same league as Joyce (little of anyone else’s writing is) but also epiphany-centered, a poem from today’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac e-newsletter:

What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back

Find a clean cloth for the kitchen table, the red and blue one
you made that cold winter in Montana. Spread out
your paper and books. Tune the radio to the jazz station.
Look at the bright orange safflowers you found last August —
how well they’ve held their color next to the black-spotted cat.

Make some egg coffee, in honor of all the people
above the Arctic Circle. Give thanks to the Sufis,
who figured out how to brew coffee
from the dark, bitter beans. Remark
on the joyfulness of your dishes: black and yellow stars.

Reminisce with your lover about the history of this kitchen
where, between bites of cashew stir fry,
you first kissed each other on the mouth. Now that you’re hungry,
toast some leftover cornbread, spread it with real butter,
honey from bees that fed on basswood blossoms.

The window is frosted over, but the sun’s casting an eye
over all the books. Open your Spanish book.
The season for sleeping is over.
The pots and pans: quiet now, let them be.

It will be a short day.
Sit in the kitchen as long as you can, reading and writing.
At sundown, rub a smidgen of butter
on the western windowsill
to ask the sun:
Come back again tomorrow.

(by Roseann Lloyd, from Because of the Light)

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* Whole different metabolism, you know. When a gargoyle’s pulse races, it sounds like a steam engine just barely pulling out of the station: Chuff… Chuff… Chuff…