"And then it was night"

The Season of Brideshead
Et in Arcadia Ego, chapter 2
I want to come back to the aesthetes and give a little background about them because I think that understanding who and what the aesthetes were adds a lot to our understanding of this chapter and this novel. But for now I want to leap ahead to the very last line of this chapter:

And then Boy Mulcaster came into the room.

I think that is meant to echo a line from the account of the Last Supper in the Gospel according to John.

I'll set it up. You know the story. Jesus says someone who is dipping bread with me (picture a bunch of guys eating bread they are dipping in the same bowl of olive oil) will betray me. And in this Gospel that specifically means Judas for Jesus dips a piece himself and hands it to Judas. (In the earlier gospels it is not clear that Jesus means a specific Apostle who is dipping at this moment or anyone at the table might be.)

Anyway, Judas then leaves the room and the last line is "And then it was night."

You could write your entire life, and most writers do, without ever writing a line that powerful.

Why is it so powerful? Partly, as I once heard an Anglican Priest preach, because there is this sense that the last moment when someone could have stopped this horrible thing from happening has passed.

The line is so powerful that it has influenced western culture profoundly and is the basis of a fairly common literary device.  In Shakespeare there is often a moment when, for example, Macbeth will be thinking about the evil events he has put in place and we can see him struggling with the notion that "I could stop this and we could just go back to normal." But he doesn't and there is a moment when it is too late. The technique can even be used to comic effect. PG Wodehouse does it over and over again. There is almost always a moment in his stories when the whole mess that follows could be avoided if someone had just spoken up and made something clear.

The device is most powerful, however, when used to introduce a coming evil because it acknowledges something very painful about evil and that is that evil will always come and there will always be a moment when we will realize the only moment we might have stopped it has passed.

Funnily enough, at the very time I heard that sermon preached there was a crucial UN debate to try and stop the slaughter of thousands of Christians in Sudan. In order for the UN to act, one of the major players to utter a single word. The word was "genocide" and nothing could happen until it was on the table. The word was never said.

And that is the more profound sense of the line. And here I have to pause a second to enlist a sympathetic reading from my non-Christian readers. I really believe this Jesus stuff and that effects how I read the Bible and how I read Brideshead and you may not. I'm not going to pressure you to believe it but try and put yourself in the shoes of someone who does believe for just a few moments.

Here is the thing, this is the way Waugh saw things too. For a Christian, and particularly for a Catholic Christian, the crucial thing about the Crucifixion is that it has to happen. Evil and suffering is not something that needs to be excused, it's just the way the world is and it takes the suffering of Christ to redeem this evil world.

So, for someone like Waugh or me, the question is not, Why is there still evil even though there is God and God's religion? Rather the point is, because we and our world are necessarily evil, we must have God and his religion to redeem us.

Anyway, at the end of this chapter, Charles and Sebastian are discussing what Anthony said about Sebastian. Sebastian, exactly as Anthony predicted, tries to dispel the bad spell this has left in the room with a silly remark about his teddy bear. The big question remains, however: How much of what Anthony said is true? It's a question that will trouble us for the rest of the book.  Because, as much as we want to love Sebastian, as even Anthony claims to do, it will be very troubling if much of it is true.

If it is true, we might say, if this stuff gets aired out, Sebastian can reform and then his relationship with Charles and his family can be set on a more promising foundation. Perhaps some horrible event could be stopped from happening.

And then Boy Mulcaster came into the room.

And the opportunity to discuss these things never came up again.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.