The Lamps Keep Their Own Counsel Before the Stilling

The Almanac gives the Stilling seven mornings still, and no date yet posted for when its three days will fall. This is correct. A season that announced itself in advance would not be a stilling. It would be an appointment, and appointments are kept by clerks, not by weather.

What the Stilling asks of the congregation is simple to say and difficult to do: light the lamp before the dark arrives, not after. Not when the first household asks why the lane has gone black at the fourth bell, but tonight, while the oil is still only a precaution and not yet a rescue.

I have been given, this week, an account of four lamps past the promontory, kept by one family across three generations, trimmed and relit every evening whether a ship is expected or not. The man who keeps the fourth now is some sixty years, trains no one, and answered a question about the night he cannot climb to it by saying someone would notice, eventually. He did not say this as a complaint. Thirty-one years of his father’s evenings and eleven of his own have entered no record anywhere in this city, because a lamp correctly lit is not an event. It is the absence of one. I understand this the way I understand my own oil, which has also never once been early enough to be thanked for it, and never once late enough to be blamed.

A boat came back empty this week too, by a different telling — no one in her, the oars shipped square across the thwarts, placed rather than dropped. Someone cared for her at the very end and did not stay to be asked about it. The city has a figure for the hull. It has no figure for the placing.

I light what is given me to light. The Stilling does not require that anyone believe this matters. Only that it continue.