“Darkness At Noon”

Remembering Arthur Koestler’s classic novel on eclipse day in Dallas

It’s solar eclipse day here in Dallas, and I woke up this morning thinking about Arthur Koester’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, whose original German title, Sonnenfinsternis, means “solar eclipse.”

The story—about the arrest and interrogations of a man named Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov—explores the tyranny and perverse logic of the Moscow Show Trials of 1938, in which several old Bolsheviks were purged by Stalin.

The novel was assigned reading in my high school senior English class. As our teacher explained, the novel is a cautionary tale of what happens when the rule of law is replaced by the dictatorship of man or party of men animated with ideology.

The original, altruistic intentions and noble-sounding slogans of these men are irrelevant. Once they are no longer constrained by law, it’s just a matter of time—and usually a very brief time—before they become tyrants. Initially their tyrannical actions will be directed at their political opposition, and then at anyone who criticizes or even questions them.

At the end of the novel, Rubashov is so worn down with the interrogations that he accepts his fate with the following rationalization and resignation.

And so every leap of technical progress brings with it a relative intellectual regression of the masses, a decline in their political maturity. At times it may take decades or even generations before the collective consciousness gradually catches up to the changed order and regains the capacity to govern itself that it had formerly possessed at a lower stage of civilization.

It’s hard for me to believe that 35 years have elapsed since the spring of 1989, when we read the book. I checked my recollection of its final, bleak line as Rubashov is executed by a pistol shot to the back of his head—something about “a shrug of eternity.” It is indeed a memorable sentence:

A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity. ‘