Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair…
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words. (Dylan Thomas, “Especially When the October Wind”)
“She cannot look anywhere, in this very instant, save into her heart, and there she’ll find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear.” (Ray Bradbury, “The Night”)
My tolerance for “scary” is and always has been non-existent. When I was seven, my mother had to confiscate a horrifyingly illustrated Book of Pirates that my brother was using, with great success, to scare the ever-living daylights out of me. When I was twelve, I went to the movies and one of the previews was for A Haunting in Connecticut. I shut my eyes and probably plugged my ears as well, but not quickly enough; since that day, I have never gone to bed without first checking the closet and then tightly closing its door. When I was fifteen, my brother (the same one as before) picked out a “classic” movie for us to watch. It was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. To this day, I still sprint up the basement stairs like a bat out of hell. More recently, when my wife and I succumbed to peer pressure and rented A Quiet Place, I was more than happy to acquiesce to her request that we watch it in the daytime.
For the record, I am not ashamed of this intolerance. Not one bit. As a matter of fact, I take pride in it. I have long considered the tendency to be scared by scary things as one of the marks of a well-adjusted, responsible citizen. Only now, as a father, am I finding exposed the weaknesses of this position. When our eldest daughter reported not being able to fall asleep because she “couldn’t stop thinking about scary skeletons,” my reaction was not one of pride and jubilation. “Hey, the future isn’t so bleak for America. This kid has got potential! She’s afraid.” No, my reaction was (of course) to comfort her, to dismiss the grounds for the fear. “It’s okay,” I told her. “Those are just decorations; they’re not real. You don’t need to be afraid.”
Mental reservation never worked so good. The obvious (to her) implication of my statement was that she didn’t need to be afraid of anything at all—not of skeleton decorations, not of twenty-foot mummies or glow-in-the-dark ghosts, not of leering witches or grim reapers, nothing. But that is not what I meant, at all. Because there is something to be scared of. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” runs the famous line of The Wasteland. Which prompts the question: Who’s afraid of a handful of dust? For that matter, who is afraid of skeletons and mummies, of ghosts and witches and grim reapers? A toddler, certainly—but why? Because for the toddler, those figures activate something; the same something that those aforementioned movies activated in me; the same something that your bogeyman activates in you—that awful something which pervades and animates all the creeping, crawling, crushing fears of the human heart, and brings out your dread.
The Stories of Ray Bradbury weighs in just shy of nine hundred pages. The hundred story-collection has some distinctly terrifying offerings. “The Small Assassin,” in which a baby, terrified of the frigid and hostile ex utero world, exacts revenge upon his parents by plotting their destruction; “Skeleton,” in which a man’s own bones turn against him; “The Next in Line,” in which a young couple falls afoul of the Mexican catacombs; “The Playground,” in which a widower strives desperately to protect his son from the nightmarish brutalism of “fun and games” in a dystopian city; “The Veldt,” in which two spoiled children turn the powers of their virtual reality against their parents, to deadly effect; and, naturally, the sundry nerve-wracking episodes from his Martian Chronicles, in which mankind reckons with the inhospitable reaches of the cosmos, “hollow, empty, like a tomb with phantoms crawling gray and black.”
Make no mistake. These stories are scary. All of them are disquieting; some are downright terrifying; each one amplifies the silence of your room, deepens the darkness outside your window, and heightens the elusive feeling, huddling in some drafty corner of your mind, that something wicked this way comes. But none of them does this more effectively than “The Night.”
In “The Night,” a young boy named Doug waits with his mother for his older brother, Skipper, to come home from his game on the other side of town. In “the warm darkness of summer,” Doug watches his mother finish the chores; he gets ice cream from Mrs. Singer’s store; they eat the ice cream together and enjoy the stillness and silence and the ice cream and the company of the other. Time wears on; it is almost nine-thirty but still no sign of Skipper. Doug’s mother wonders where he could be, but Doug assures her: “He’ll be here,” he says, “knowing full well he will be.” Time wears on further; Doug is ready for bed when his mother tells him to wait. Then she calls for Skipper. “Skipper. Skipper. Skipper. Skipper!” Suddenly Doug is unsettled. “A coldness that is not ice cream and not winter and not part of summer’s heat, goes through you.”
Bradbury writes the story in the second person singular to amazing effect. The “you” is Doug, but it is also you, the reader. You know that, because you yourself feel that cold feeling as you read each line of the story, forcing yourself not to cheat and read ahead and find the assurance that Skipper is safe and sound. Instead, you pace with Doug and his mother, one slow, nervous step at a time, as they take their walk down the block. One block becomes another, and before you know it, you and Doug and Doug’s mother are at the ravine. “Together, then, you approach, reach, and pause at the very edge of civilization.”
This “very edge of civilization” descriptor is a provocative one. Civilization is one of those words—like culture, liturgy, or tradition—the meaning of which seems self-evident at first blush, but which becomes increasingly and tediously inaccessible upon further examination or repeated use. We could go right around this mountain of obscurity by simply noting that “civilization” derives from the Latin words civis (citizen) and civitas (city), and then move on. Bradbury is simply pointing out that Doug and his mother stand on the precipice of the city. End of discussion.
Or is it? The scenic route up and over the mountain is far more interesting than the shortcut around it. What does Bradbury mean by this invocation of civilization? Bradbury, who described himself as “that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all,” would have been the kind of client Sigmund Freud could only dream of having. Civilization, Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, “describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.”
If civilization didn’t exert some control over our “mutual relations,” then those relationships would be determined by a given individual’s “own interests and instinctual impulses.” In Freud’s construal, civilization steps in and inhibits or represses those interests and instinctual impulses and prevents us from acting them out, thereby manufacturing some sort of social order, albeit one populated by masses of repressed individuals. For his purposes, this is bad.
My reservations about the validity of his judgment aside, I think Freud’s descriptive point holds true. Civilization does inhibit our ability to follow our basic instincts and act on our primal emotions. But that’s only part of the tale. Even within the parameters of civilization, I still feel those emotions, I still shiver with fear about the prospect of death being dealt out to my brother. Civilization just prevents my acting in such a way that I descend into madness in the process of experiencing that fear.
Or does it? Is it actually the case that, not civilization, but another primal force is my guide and defense against the “un-civilized”? The power keeping Doug’s fear at bay is not civilization, but his mother:
Leaving the sidewalk, you walk along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path to the ravine’s edge. Crickets, in loud full drumming chorus now, are shouting to quiver the dead. You follow obediently behind brave, fine, tall Mother who is defender of all the Universe. You feel braveness because she goes before…
Curiously enough, Doug’s mom is not only his safeguard against his fear; she’s also the one who puts it in him in the first place. He isn’t fazed by Skipper’s silence until she is; he isn’t alarmed until her shout “into the dark” rings out with terror in its very tone and tenor. Even as he peers down into “that pit of jungled blackness” where lurks “all the evil you will ever know,” he maintains his composure; even as he realizes their solitude in the face of that evil, he keeps his cool. Then “her hand trembles. Her hand trembles.”
Your belief in your private world is shattered. You feel Mother tremble. Why? Is she, too, doubtful? But she is bigger, stronger, more intelligent than yourself, isn’t she? Does she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Is there, then, no strength in growing up? no solace in being an adult? no sanctuary in life? no flesh citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flush you…you are instantly cold as wind out of December-gone.
You realize that all men are like this. That each person is to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If you should scream now, if you should holler for help, would it matter?
To do justice to the story, I will leave the summary here. Bradbury heightens and heightens the tension over the story’s last two pages to the point where it is as palpable as the pages upon which it is written, and that mastery deserves better than my fragmentary treatment.
Besides, my point has been made. The scary thing of “The Night” is not the ravine or any other external object or place or its atmosphere. No, the scary thing of “The Night” is the dread we carry within the earthen vessel that is our very self. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”: we are that handful of dust.
Our self-contained dread is what animates the raw material of “that crouching malignancy” in the ravine and causes it to rear up and out towards Doug. In the child, it animates the dark, the skeletons, and the mummies as scary. When that child puts away childish things, his dread will do the same. For the adult, it matures and gives shape and substance to fears about such future contingencies as the loss of his child through death, or the loss of her physical vigor by some serious accident or her spiritual welfare by sin or scandal.
It is necessary, even good, that a force exists that can protect us against the world but also teach us how to live in it. But that force is not “civilization” or “society”; it is the primordial order of mother and father. Civilization is not a father or mother “substitute”; but, properly functioning, an extension of its power and a guarantee of its continued existence. Perhaps a past civilization could answer the questions that Doug is asking and correct his misgivings about the nature of the world and man’s place therein. But our society won’t; our society can’t. “Each person is to himself one alone…always afraid,” a young man avers, somewhere in the here and now. And the online principalities and powers, with one fell voice, affirm his dread.
They affirm his dread but they cannot mediate the realities invigorated by that dread inside of him. But a mother and a father can. A child should learn from his mother and father that there is indeed a strength in growing up; a solace in being an adult; a sanctuary in life; a citadel—not of flesh but of spirit and truth—strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assaults of midnights. He can learn this by seeing that some things are worth being afraid of and the extent to which he feels that fear will indicate the extent to which he is living life to the full.
Absent that mediating influence, the fear inside the child apparently metastasizes and he projects the world inside his head onto the world outside of it. Thus, when Bradbury says of Doug’s mother, “She cannot look anywhere, in this very instant, save into her heart, and there she’ll find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear”—we have to understand that this is not reality as it is, but reality as Doug sees it, reality according to the child left petrified and powerless by the unchecked dread in his heart. Now everything, not just something, is scary; now everyone, not just himself, is scared. Doug’s description of the “towns” of the world is equally apropos of the people who live in them; for his fearful purposes, life is saturated with this brooding malevolence.
There are a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins is the small towns’ music, with no lights but many shadows. Oh the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life is a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, are threatened by an ogre called Death.
I said it already but I’ll say it again: the scary thing of “The Night” is our own native dread, the fear we house in our hearts, and its awful debilitating power. We will always have that dread; it is delusional to pretend otherwise and say we need not be afraid of anything at all. We will always have that dread: “It [the fear] will be in her heart though, for all time, as it is in your heart, for all time.” The character and influence of our fears should vary according to our station in life. A son should not have the same fears as his mother, nor should she be afraid the way as he is.
Yet that is what happens in “The Night.” Doug’s extension of his childish dread into the heart of his mother, where it becomes an inescapable and definitive element of life, is Bradbury’s magnificent closing statement. A world where adults and children share the same fears and everyone knows it: this is a cold, comfortless, and cruel place—a place of horror and constant twilight, “when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, are threatened by an ogre called Death.” This world is not simply the surreal stuff of fiction. It can be our world, too.
And this, I think, is Bradbury’s point in “The Night”—maybe even the moral of the story. It would be a point well in keeping with his other tales of caution against the twentieth century’s myriad destructive tendencies. Doug’s mother “puts away her fear instantly,” and he knows “she will never tell anybody of it ever.” If mothers (and fathers) do not stand “fine, brave, and tall” and the world and speak to the fears of children, then those fears will consume us all.
A mother once lost her young son amongst the crowds in the city. The fear she felt then was but a flicker of the fire of sorrow and dread that would befall her when her son grew up. Then, as he underwent his Passion, she suffered hers. In “La Passion de Notre Dame,” the French poet Charles Péguy imagines this drama:
She too had gone up her Calvary.
She too had gone up and up…
She wept as it will never be granted to a woman to weep.
As it will never be asked
Of a woman to weep on this earth.
Never at any time.
What was very strange was that everyone respected her.
People greatly respect the parents of the condemned.
They even said: Poor woman.
And at the same time they struck at her son.
Because man is like that.
The world is like that.
Men are what they are and you never can change them.
She did not know that, on the contrary, he had come to change man.
That he had come to change the world.
She followed and wept.
And at the same time they were beating her boy.
Fear is correlative to love; the more you love, the more you have to be afraid of losing. Fear functions the way suffering does in Léon Bloy’s remark that “man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.” The depth with which we feel the pangs of the fear that Doug’s mother felt as she contemplated the “vast swelling loneliness” of a world without her son in it—that depth will be indicative of the expansiveness of our hearts. The living proof of that claim is the Mother we call blessed. If it was given to the mother of God to weep as “it will never be granted to a woman to weep,” then who am I to resist the call to bring out my dread? Let dread have its say. The last word has already been spoken.
Credits: Johann Walter-Kurau, Trunks and Foliage (1925), via Wikimedia Commons; Joseph Mugnaini, cover art for Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, 1st ed. (1972); and Edvard Munch, Workers on Their Way Home (b/t 1913 and 1914), via Wikimedia Commons.