Why Gathering Light?
Or what this newsletter is all about.
Welcome to this newsletter where you'll find each piece focused on a particular literary work and the light it sheds on the human condition.
The name “Gathering Light” comes from the final scene of “A Midsummer Night's Dream”.1 After the usual web of Shakespearean mischief and misunderstandings, the alienated characters reconcile and marry one another.
The fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania charge their entourage to give a nuptial blessing to the three newly married human couples.
Oberon begins: “Through the house give gathering light / By the dead and drowsy fire,” with Titania then taking up the theme: “Hand in hand, with fairy grace, / Will we sing and bless this place.”
A few lines on, Oberon makes explicit that their blessing is naturally related to fertility: “To the best bride-bed will we, / Which by us shall blessed be; / And the issue, there create, / Ever shall be fortunate. / So shall all the couples three / Ever true in loving be.”
The images of light, love, and fertility appear together in this scene, with the stoking of the fires clearly being linked to the blessing of “issue”, that is, children, and of faithful love.
For Shakespeare well-ordered, life-giving romantic love is often an image of a higher, spiritual love. So the giving of gathering firelight and of fidelity and fecundity to the three couples also suggests a stoking up of the light of wisdom: a fertile light that begets love for and shows the way to union with that which is true, good, and beautiful.
My aim in this newsletter is both to engage in the act of gathering wisdom from various works of literature, and in doing so, to create a source of gathering or growing light.
Reading slowly, deeply, and discerningly is a countercultural practice in an age when books are published and consumed quickly. So too is reading old things in favor of the eye-catchingly new. Writers in conversation with many centuries of tradition are fashionably disposed of in favor of amnesic group think.
The wisdom we find in older or unappreciated books may be a light in the dark mischief and misunderstandings of our age. Let us seek to gather it and, thus, to find the way.
The phrase appears in different editions of the play as “glimmering light”, hence the title of Rackham’s painting.
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