Darkness at noon

Abstract

Darkness at noon is an occurrence which violently alters established patterns of nature — a frightening moment. In literature and poetry, this motif has been abstracted and appears repeatedly throughout time. Towards the end of the Odyssey, for example, when Ulysses returns home to Ithaca and finds a gang of lusty suitors vying for his wife Penelope, there is a moment of madness before the final massacre. The suitors gorge themselves one last time on the cows of Ulysses, and under the flat white light of noon, they feel a deep darkness in their souls as they intuit the return of the king and their impending doom. Again, in the Bible, darkness at noon accompanies that moment when Christ dies on the cross, symbolising the moment when the ancient world is pulled out of its torpor and into a new modernity.