Lamps/ Shades

\"Shades\" (Polish: \"Cienie\") is one of Bolesław Prus' shortest micro-stories. more...

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Written in 1885, it comes from a several years' period of pessimism in the author's life caused in part by the 1883 failure of Nowiny (News), a Warsaw daily that he had been editing for less than a year. Prus, the \"lamplighter\" who had striven to dispel darkness and its attendant \"fear, error and crime,\" had failed to sufficiently interest the public in his \"observatory of societal facts,\" Nowiny.

Shades

As the sun's rays die away in the heavens, twilight emerges from the earth. Twilight: a great army of the night, with thousands of invisible columns and billions of soldiers. A mighty army that from time immemorial has contended with light, broken in rout with every dawn, conquered with every nightfall, held sway from sunset to sunrise, and in the daytime, scattered, has taken refuge in places of concealment and has waited.

Waited in mountain chasms and urban cellars, in forest thickets and depths of dark lakes. Waited as it lurked in ageless caverns in the ground, in mines, ditches, corners of homes, recesses of walls. Dispersed and seemingly absent, yet it fills every nook and cranny. It is present in every crevice of tree bark, in folds of people's clothing, it lies beneath the smallest grain of sand, clings to the finest spider's thread, and waits. Flushed from one place, in the twinkling of an eye it moves to another, availing itself of the slightest opportunity to return whence it had been banished, to break into unoccupied positions and flood the earth.

As the sun expires, a twilight army, silent and cautious, moves out in serried ranks from its refuges. It fills the corridors, hallways and poorly lit staircases of buildings; from under wardrobes and tables it creeps out into the middle of the room and besets the curtains; through cellar airholes and through windows it slips out into the streets, storms in dead silence the walls and roofs and, lurking on the rooftops, patiently waits for the rosy clouds to fade away in the west.

Another moment, and there will suddenly spring up an immense explosion of darkness reaching from earth to heaven. Animals will hide in their lairs, men will run home; life, like a plant without water, will contract and begin to wither. Colors and shapes will dissolve into nothingness; fear, error and crime will take their sway over the world.

At that moment, on the streets of Warsaw that are falling desert, there appears the curious figure of a man with a small flame over his head. He dashes down the sidewalk as if pursued by the darkness, stops for an instant at each lamp, then having kindled a merry light, vanishes like a shade.

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