Outside, the summer night laden and sweet with all its transparent blue mysteries… Inside, in my solitary and calm room shadowed by the emerald darkness produced by the lamp’s green shade, I… Sometimes the solitary and separation-laden nightingale sounds echoing from the distances of the sleeping surroundings mix with the frogs’ metallic laughter with the intoxicating breath of wind, then again silence, this eternal humming silence of the burning hot night…
To rest my eyes tired from the endless lines of books on which I spent all the hours of my youth with the greed of labor, I abandon reading for a bit. And I lean back. My mind weary, my intellect exhausted in the demand for diversity of the things it wants to encompass… Oh! I say. I stay like that without thinking anything, listening to the sudden humming starting in my ears. Three or four moths are circling around the lamp; with empty gazes I follow their movements, their hesitant flights; they turn around the light in reverse circles to each other, sometimes resting by leaning on the shade, then starting to fly again; flying, resting, flying again, they begin to attack the hot glass of the nickel lamp with their increasing desire. They attack so rapidly that the terrible collision of their poor tiny heads with the fiery glass is heard like a disappointing and distant treacherous blow. Suddenly I feel a nervous sorrow; I want to drive them away from around the lamp with my hands, from this burning, destructive fire they throw themselves at with such care. Paying no attention to my hands, giving them no importance, perhaps not seeing them at all, they throw themselves again. Then I say “Poor little things! Burn if you wish!” and withdraw. Once free, their attacks increase; the sound of collision of this tragedy of care is heard more. First the smallest one, after a final attack, with its head burned, its feet scorched, falls to the base of the lamp, into the circular shadow. A bit later the second, then the third… On their backs, two on the pages of the open book, one at the base of the book. The fourth is hurrying to reach its destined goal like its companions, continuing its mad attacks with the most violent passion.
I begin to think; this fire… and this poor insignificant creature… In spring’s moist nights when the entire universe is covered like a massive and vaporizing black drop of tears, a dark breath light as a virginal kiss, like a captive flower fallen to earth, nurtured in the mysterious depths of dark and vast fields’ vegetation… Oh my God! Why do these poor children of darkness, these offspring of night’s shadows, throw themselves at this fire like this, sacrificing their lives to their desire? This greed, this ambition, this desire, this love… Oh, the last one, the fourth also falls, dies; while dying, its eyes—barely distinguishable as two tiny black dots—are directed toward and longing for the light… Involuntarily my sorrow increases; the presence of these poor dead in the illuminating environment of the light that was their killer seems more tragic to me. I turn down the lamp, extinguish it. At first I can’t see their little corpses in the darkness. Then when my eyes adjust, I see all of them, all four lifeless, motionless like black spots.
The death of these poor creatures, undoubtedly nothing, undoubtedly the most insignificant of falling incidents, awakens in my soul a serious, ambiguous and irresistible black mourning. The moonlight entering from the right window, touching the small bookshelf hanging in front of the table, reflects like an illuminated “diamond.” I watch their little corpses with the same presence of mourning and sorrow. I think about their loves, desires, ambitions, greeds, then about death which is the absolute end of all these. The illuminated “diamond” grows, grows, grows; it takes the shelf, the black spots of other books piled under the shelf, the lamp rising sad and extinct like a regretful petrified statue of death into its silver geometric dominion, spreads over the books and table that are the calm scene of mourning for four tragic deaths, gilds first two of the dead, then the third, then the fourth with a soft and compassionate light, as if shrouding them with a shroud of light.
From outside, the solitary and separation-laden nightingale sounds coming from the strange distances of sleepy horizons mix with the frogs’ successive, resonating metallic harmonies; the breath of pleasant wind, with unconscious and invisible touches, trembles the notes, the book pages shining on the table under the white light of the moon, as if fanning the clean and delicate mourning of these poor dead who were living and fluttering just now with its light and mystery-nurturing wings… I, despairing and sorrowful, remember the terrible futility of our ambitions, our desires, our passions before our absolute mortality; emptinesses… this frightening abyss deepening with endless and clear emptinesses, with dark and unknown nonexistences—for those indifferent and cheerful at the edge, for those deceived, playing happy and unaware in the exciting and deceptive cradle of false dreams… ah, for our poor selves, I want to cry eternally with bitter and poisonous tears!…
Kuşadası
Ömer Seyfettin
