In moonlight we pale into insignificance
I remember fishing late up the Tekapo River as the Moon rose, and it turned the water to mercury and it bright-lit every stone on the long walk back to camp.
Iwas sleeping on the sofa because of Covid, when the bladder nudged me awake. I had a choice between a long cold pad down the corridor to the toilet and a short warm one to the front door and the drain in the garden.
At three in the morning and two-thirds asleep I am a unicellular creature compelled by simple stimuli, so I just lumbered across the living-room carpet and opened the front door and stepped out into the night. I was assailed on the instant by moonlight and cold.
Groping back to bed after a piss I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
That’s Larkin, and typically so. It’s rooted in the ordinary, but it’s extraordinarily well done. The first word conjures the fumbling, half-awake, middle-ofthe-night, beset-by-darkness self. And he contrasts that self with the vast clarity of the Moon and the clouds and the dwarfing heavens.
Moonlight is the best light. I remember fishing late up the Tekapo River as the Moon rose, and it turned the water to mercury and it bright-lit every stone on the long walk back to camp.
And moonlight’s the most literary light. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is washed with it, Keats is drenched in it and Hardy’s novels gleam with it.
Streetlights kill it dead. Does an urban child know moonlight exists? Does an urban child even
know the Moon has phases?
The Moon last Tuesday night was full as a dinner plate and bright enough to cast shadows, and it turned my rank winter garden into a place of statuary.
‘‘There’s something laughable about this,’’ Larkin goes on to say. Bang right there is. It’s the comedy of insignificance. It’s the hubris of the human condition.
And out there beneath a bright full Moon, naked as the day I was born, straddling the drain like a beast of the field, I would have burst out laughing at it all if it hadn’t been so bloody cold.
I’d been there only 30 seconds when a shiver ran through my flesh. Yet all around me were unseen little creatures spending the night out there alone, some curled in nest and burrow, others fossicking in the darkness, all of them houseless and clothesless, yet all of them fending off the cold as I could not.
How long would I last out here, the naked ape, without a stitch of clothing and a fire to warm me? One tough night? Maybe two? I wouldn’t want to try.
I was Tom o’Bedlam, the naked beggar in King Lear. Lear in his madness was seeking the heart of the mystery and in Poor Tom he felt he was getting near it.
‘‘Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool,’’ said Lear. ‘‘Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art.’’
And all Poor Tom could say was ‘‘Tom’s a-cold’’.
The moment my duty was done this poor bare forked animal dashed back in and shut the night out, barred the door, threw logs on the log-burner, turned it to high, lay back down on the sofa and pulled the duvet over me, a duvet stuffed with feathers ripped from some poor duck.
I brought my knees to my chest and hugged myself and felt the warmth return to skin and flesh and bone, and within minutes I was sleeping while the night went on outside beneath a full unfeeling Moon.