A Siren at Night
The whirl of a distant siren
Prague 2016
Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
In the windswept cold of late fall, with its chill and gray and gloom, you begin to assume that life resembles a Cormac McCarthy novel, as it takes a rather optimistic spirit to believe that we won’t soon feast on the dead. The days begin later and end earlier, with sunlight bestowed as a mere tease—here for a moment, over there for a bit, and now gone. So you’re left in a stupor. In the daze of a midafternoon nap that ends in darkness. Of course nature does have many clocks to judge time—the sun’s daily arc, the early morning birds, all those skittish, crepuscular animals—but these clocks lose their precision in the fall, leaving you, instead, with nothing but the cloudy and colorless and obscure.
If you spend your hours scribbling lines—or consumed by anything cerebral—you’ll miss many of these natural clocks. Occasionally, perhaps, you’ll notice a slight chill on your skin, or feel a sudden thirst, and so you’ll put on an extra layer and grab another drink; but, with your head down and your focus on the page, you’ll almost always overlook the shifting landscape just beyond your eyes.
He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so spent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.
Thus begins chapter two of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, where the landscape is boundless yet hushed. We are in an expansive yet sombre world, where it’s impossible to forget how nature’s pulse redounds onto us. We aren’t separated from our setting, nor do we ignore the meaning behind a creeping wind or distant howl. We’re in a place and mindset, in other words, that’s quite different from most contemporary lives.
Last night, I lifted my head at the right moment and heard the whirl of a faint siren. For a few minutes, I realized, I had been ignoring this blare as it drifted across the city and slipped through my window. But once the piercing whirl caught my attention, I couldn’t hear anything else, as the evening had a soft, slumberous quality, the nighttime sounds of summer having long since passed. When I strained to listen closer, to hear anything else at all, the night seemed to dissolve, with only the siren sweeping through the air—an everlasting call, perhaps, for wayward ships to veer toward the rocks. Over time, of course, I began to notice how a slight wind shook a tree just outside my window, then I heard the ignition of a car, and a muffled conversation, the siren just an echo against the concrete, its pulse beginning to recede in the distance.