Dark time

Keep awake, urges the Gospel messenger in the readings for the beginning of the Christian festival of Advent. That’s not easy in late November when by lunchtime the sun is already fast dropping to the horizon. The propensity to nap, to switch off, can be overwhelming. In Finland it must be so much worse. For two months, from mid-November to mid-January, the sun never rises at all. Everything has to be accomplished in total twilight. The Light in Darkness, a 20-minute short on Radio 3 (Thursday evening), took us inside the ‘dark time’, with an eerie impression of the northern winter that was so sharply evoked you could almost hear the air freezing on your breath, crackle, crunch.

One woman told us how she could deal with the lethargy of winter, those feelings of pointlessness brought on by the eternal gloom, only by taking a daily bath in the ice-cold Baltic. We listened as she trudged through the snow from her house to the sea, drilled a circle through the ice to make a hole, and then splashed in. Aaagghh. But that daily confrontation with the outside forces of nature, that willingness to take on the seasons and not be defeated, helps her to tune back in to her desire to survive. Until at last the day comes when the sun slowly creeps above the horizon for the first time, and shadows begin to appear again on the snow.

Many of those who spoke on the programme believe that it was easier to deal with the dark time before electricity smoothed out the seasons and brought artificial light (and in some places it didn’t arrive until 1973). ‘We cannot survive without light. But nature concentrates the light in food.’