AtDDtA1: The Falling Darkness

[Monte Davis]

David Casseres:
 -----
"... the indecorous couple had vanished among the foliage, as presently
would this sector of the Republic into the falling darkness." (AtD, 
Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 13) 
 
I'd say that last clause is something of a concealed weapon casually
revealed.  Made the back of my neck prickle.  On its face it just means it's
getting dark, but the way it's written, and the way it's dropped on the
ground like a glove or a rose or a letter, give it a more sinister weight.
-----
 
It's a signature move, one that P has been refining for decades, and often
uses time of day. Might he have learned something from his old teacher
Nabokov? Here's Pnin recalling his dreary lodgings over the years at
Waindell:
 
"The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those
displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and
inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the
soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens,
and nobody really loves anybody." 
 
Can't you hear V. coming in that flourish at the end, Benny yo-yoing to
Norfolk one more time? It's a simultaneous escape from and opening-out of
context, with emotional resonance that can be breathtaking. P most often
uses it to elegiac effect -- in GR, Carroll Eventyr thinking of Nora:
 
"She was deepening from his waking, his social eye like light at the edge of
the evening when, for perhaps a perilous ten minutes, nothing helps: put on
your glasses and light lamps, sit by the west window and still it keeps
going away, you keep losing the light and perhaps it is forever this time .
. . a good time of day for learning surrender, learning to diminish like the
light, or like certain music."
 
 But P can turn it to morning's purposes as well, as at the end of the
Utgarthaloki banquet:
 
"The last black butler opens the last door to the outside, and escape.
Escape tonight. 'Pimple pie with filth frosting, gentlemen,' he nods. 
And just at the other side of dawning, you can see a smile."
 
 
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