You Still Have About Ten Minutes. How Do You Feel?

03/15/2025

A cousin mentioned recently that she was aiming to re-read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.  Oddly enough, I've read that only once, unironically on the train from Helsinki to Leningrad back in '86 (I had this paperback edition).  I feel no compulsion to give it another go because the final paragraphs have haunted me ever since:

What had he said to them? "I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people. . . ." And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land?

Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one's goal before one's eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night.

A dull blow struck the back of his head. He had long expected it and yet it took him unawares. He felt, wondering, his knees give way and his body whirl round in a half-turn. How theatrical, he thought as he fell, and yet I feel nothing. He lay crumpled up on the ground, with his cheek on the cool flagstones. It got dark, the sea carried him rocking on its nocturnal surface. Memories passed through him, like streaks of mist over the water.

Outside, someone was knocking on the front door, he dreamed that they were coming to arrest him; but in what country was he?

He made an effort to slip his arm into his dressing-gown sleeve. But whose colour-print portrait was hanging over his bed and looking at him?

Was it No. 1 or was it the other—he with the ironic smile or he with the glassy gaze?

A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver-belt; but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform—and in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?

A second, smashing blow hit him on the ear. Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.

On another train journey - this time from Vilnius back to Moscow in '90 - I have surreal memories of sharing a not-overly-cramped sleeper with a couple friends and a few Soviet soldiers heading home (they got on in Minsk).  It was actually quite cool, at one point an older grunt borrowing my buddy's guitar, quietly strumming Russian folk chords as we chatted casually all through the night about geopolitics, pop culture, where we grew up, etc.  The smell of leather holsters is seared into my brain, probably because one younger Russki kept un-snapping and re-snapping his in the darkened cabin (one guy in our party said later he was ready to pounce on the dude if he pulled his weapon, but it seems to have been just a nervous habit).

Anyway, I recall two very distinct times I've actively pondered that final line's "shrug of eternity": first, watching The Americans; second, when I tried to kill myself.  So yeah, imma just leave the book there, in the dark past.

Selah.