The New Yorker:

A Christmas essay.

By Vinson Cunningham

December’s so dramatic. For weeks, the days darken—a quickening fade that suggests a coming show. It’s depressing to leave home around four-thirty and realize the sun’s already set. But the darkness has its clarifying benefits. One of my friends, a photographer, recently told me about a new energy in his work, coinciding with the slide toward the solstice. When the light’s this scarce, you’ve got to grab it while you can.

Darkness that, by contrast, makes light all the brighter; bright moments that seem to redeem the dark: that black-and-white opposition is, for me, what makes up the poignant imagery of Christmas. Think of the famous scene: wise men navigating by the stars—flaming constellations against a fathomless sky—searching the dank nooks of Rome’s empire for an incandescent child. Handel quotes the prophet Isaiah—that urgent, scathing, unpredictable voice—in the “Messiah”: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Right now, my living room reeks pleasantly of pine—little white pinpricks against so many dark green leaves. (The great comedian and writer Paul Mooney once made fun of dark-light talk like this, pointing out how hopelessly racialized it tends to be in a society like our own. Mocking a melodramatic pronouncement, he wailed, “It was the darkest day of my life!” Fair enough.)

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