I hear, “hour of the wolf,” and I think, “fear of the dark.”
Or the fear of not-knowing what’s coming. Of what monsters the dark might be hiding.
In Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, the protagonist held darkness at bay around a candle-lit table until dawn. The real darkness was his dream world, of course, his nightmares. They were too dark. Too much!
The horror! The horror!
Where’ve we heard that before? In Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, the ultimate treatise on the dangers of flirting with the unknown.
The moral of Conrad’s story: Don’t mess with the dark. There are truths in there that could drive you mad. We can’t handle the truth! That’s what Conrad is saying. Stay away!
Okay, let’s go there.
Up the Congo
Heart of Darkness concerns a riverboat captain forging up the Congo River to find and repatriate a rogue ivory trader named Kurtz.
The story takes the protagonist as far from our well-lit societies as one can get. The hero struggles against lawless landscapes, self-doubt, and the utter loss of one’s bearings to the point of existential terror.
“The earth seemed unearthly. We are used to seeing it as a chained-up monster, but there it was monstrous and free.”
Monstrous and free.
Likewise the rogue Kurtz, when at last he’s located deep in the jungle, he has become a monster. In his deathbed delirium, his final words: “The horror! The horror!”
The shocking moral of the story, in case you missed it
The riverboat captain returns home with his mouth zipped shut tight. He’s seen too much. Freedom is not for humans. It’s too much for the human organism to bear.
Re-entering polite society, the captain has gained a new respect for our civilizations with their bedazzling lights and myriad distractions. Let there be light! Lest we become monsters.
Aldous Huxley, in his treatise on “Man and Reality”, serves up a warning for us not to forget what lurks out there in the dark, beyond our well-lit lives:
The street lamps eclipse the stars, and the glare of the whisky advertisements reduces even the moonlight to an almost invisible irrelevance. Man is the inhabitant … of a homemade universe, scooped by himself out of the immense, nonhuman cosmos which surrounds it. Within this private catacomb, we build up for ourselves a little world of our own, constructed of words and technologies, cravings and day dreams, artifacts and institutions, imaginary gods and demons. But night and stars are always there. That nonhuman world, of which the stars and night are but symbols, persists and is the real world.
I see Joseph Conrad’s riverboat captain joining Bergman’s protagonist around that candle-lit table waiting for the hour of the wolf to pass.
Waiting for the blessed dawn.
