Koestler, Arthur :: Darkness at Noon

authors

Koestler, Arthur

In the middle of the night, a high-ranking party official gets arrested. How do you even begin to reason about terms as vague as "official"? I'm slowly losing my patience with these language-games, as I spend longer and longer without understanding their nature. I want to ask, "what do you mean? Why can't you just say what you mean?" - even though I know how nonsensical that is, even though I know my mind is just seeing my yearning and creating a mirage in front of it. That there exists a phrase - "say what you mean" - that attaches to that mirage is one of the nastier tricks of the nature of language. These cut-and-dried everydays that people wish to live in are the world that Number One is trying to create in the book. He has, rightly, left behind the mournful doubters who yearned with him, and is now killing them at leisure, one by one, body and mind. Our protagonist is a man of culture, a man who has lived inside the paradox of language and suffered, and tried to turn traitor. He discovers that one cannot replace nature with justice so easily. Everyone knows he knows. Stalin knows he knows. He knows why he needs to die. He lets the implacable tide of the craving for certitude swallow him and hopes that the vast ocean of the sky, the numberless people that will live after, will hold in them the potential for the point of discontinuity that he thought he saw in the history; or that something among all the things that he does not understand holds inside of it a thing that is what he was trying to reach for.