Lydia Davis in The Yale Review:
An unusual experience started me thinking even more closely about degrees of darkness, the nature of darkness, and darkness as a physical thing. I had attended a meeting in an isolated building down a country road with woods beyond. The meeting was over, and it was time to go home. Our cars were parked a few hundred yards away from the building. My friend J., wearing a light blue sweater, went out the door first. I left the building a minute later and stopped short. Looking in the direction of the cars, I saw nothing. I saw nothing at all but solid darkness, a wall of darkness. It must have been a cloudy night, because the sky was dark. The closest house, across the road, was dark.
J., though she had no light, had walked ahead anyway into the darkness. Now she called to me that she couldn’t see and didn’t know where she was. I couldn’t see either. I looked toward her voice and saw only the faintest dim patch where she was—her sweater against the dark. I knew the landscape, so I knew that she was headed away from the cars and into a field of grass.
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