A Shining by Jon Fosse

 


There you are, isolated in a forest as dusk turns into night, and there's just been a snowfall. Your car is stuck many miles from the nearest house. You try walking along a path and now you're so lost, you'll never even find your car. It's been two days since your last meal and you didn't bring a heavy jacket. You're hungry, freezing, tired, and realize this is it - you're going to die.

A Shinning is Norwegian author Jon Fosse's novella about a man coming face to face with his own death. Then, out in the forest, in the darkness of night, all alone, this man, this unnamed narrator, sees something separate from the darkness and come toward him.

"Now I see it clearly. Something coming toward me, and maybe it's a person. Or what. Yes, it probably has to be a person. But it can't be a person. It's just not possible that I'm seeing a person , not here, not now. But what is it then. I see the outline of something, and it looks like a person. Because it can't very well be anything else, can it. I stand totally still. I stand like I don't dare move. Now it's really as dark as it can get and there in front of me I see the outline of something that looks like a person. A shining outline, getting clearer and closer."

What happens from this point forward? I urge anybody interested in the ultimate questions we face as humans to take an hour or two to read this short fiction by Jon Fosse. One thing of note: the narrator's visions and experience do not take on anything that can be identified with a specific religion. I could include words of wisdom from any of the spiritual traditions, from Christianity to Islam, from Taoism to Buddhism; however, I'd suggest you read and reflect on this compelling tale with the following quotes in mind, quotes taken from the Rhineland mystics, including Meister Eckhart, a writer central to both Jon Fosse himself and the artist/narrator of his Septology, an artist who could very well also be the narrator of A Shining.


"Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us." ― Meister Eckhart


“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.” ― Meister Eckhart


"The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge." ― Meister Eckhart


"I have often repented of having spoken. I have never repented of silence." ― Henry Suso


"Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying." ― Johannes Tauler


Norwegian author Jon Fosse, born 1959