DARKNESS, DREAD, AND INSIGHT

In the northern hemisphere, the church season of Epiphany coincides appropriately with the winter solstice. The celebration of light begins just two weeks after the longest night of the year. In a lucid (from the Latin lucidus, "bright") essay on the occasion of the solstice last month in the Chicago Tribune, cultural critic Julia Keller—one of the best descriptive writers in newspapers—reflects on the function of darkness in her childhood and her reading. The daughter of an itinerant academic, she remembers cross-country car trips under the cover of night, when the tiny glow of her father's cigarette commanded her attention, and headlights and gas station lamps seemed brash and intrusive.

Perhaps in part because of those nocturnal rides, "I love the literature of darkness," Keller writes. "I don't mean thrillers filled with ghouls … but writing that is delicately night-haunted, stained by obvious insomnia and solitary musings. The works of James Agee and Joseph Conrad are clear examples; I find it hard to believe that either man ever willingly took up a pen in daylight." As Keller comments on their work, darkness becomes less a subject of dread and more of an agent of insight. "At night, there's more to listen for," she writes, and speaks of "the contemplation knitted most exquisitely in darkness." Her piece is subtly uplifting as the Christmas tree comes down and we enter two of the gloomiest months on the calendar, and it serves as a call to patience as daylight gradually grows longer.

Elsewhere in the Tribune: Keller's three-part series on the victims and science of brain injuries

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

IKITSUKI, Japan — Japan's "hidden Christians," descendants of people converted by Portuguese missionaries in the late 1500's during a brief window of religious freedom in Japan, … survived some 300 years of bannings, burnings and beheadings. The repression began to ease in 1853 … and was ended officially with the legalization of Christianity in 1873. In the late 19th century, missionaries returned to the remote islands of southern Japan and coaxed about 50,000 hidden Christians into the open. … But the hidden Christians now are facing perhaps the greatest challenge to their faith. It comes not from official persecutors but from a force perhaps more powerful and less easily resisted: indifference. For young people, hours spent learning ancient chants and rituals detract from time spent driving over a new half-mile bridge to Kyushu Island and on to Nagasaki for the weekend. With only 7,500 people, the island has lost a third of its population since the 1960's. … Now the only young people studying the chants are students and professors. "No one is taking over," lamented the Rev. Tomeichi Ohoka, the 85-year-old pastor.

MIAMI — Just past the shadows of a highway overpass, a curiosity rises from the sidewalk: two walls of a giant living room, papered in pink and open to the sky, with a beckoning couch and a window looking west, away from the beaches that have long been this region's wealth and pride. The artists who created this unfinished room, in a neighborhood most visitors never glimpse, say the work is a metaphor for Miami, the so-called Magic City—just over 100 years old and still deciding what it wants to make of itself. Miami, as ever, is yearning to be taken seriously. Not as a workaday annex of its hedonistic neighbor, Miami Beach, but as a cosmopolitan center in its own right.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• The favorite in the New Hampshire primary this month, presidential candidate Howard Dean prides himself on being frank—"perhaps too frank" on one subject, writes Franklin Foer in a cover story in the New Republic. "[I] don't go to church very often," the ex-Episcopalian, current Congregationalist blurted in a debate last year. "My religion doesn't inform my public policy." Among an electorate "that prefers its politicians to be openly religious," Foer says, Dean would falter in a race against President Bush. "In the last five presidential elections, the candidate who more aggressively conveyed his religiosity (whether honestly or not so honestly) won," he says. "Howard Dean is one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history." Full story What Foer doesn't address is whether Dean can be said to lack strong convictions, and whether expectations of conformity to a public piety make for good leadership.

Related: Jim Wallis in the New York Times on the Democrats' lack of faith

• One of Dean's rallying cries is that President Bush's policies favor the rich, a cry Paul Krugman repeats (and repeats and … ) in his recently published collection of columns. But when Krugman says we are approaching the extremes of the nineteenth century's Gilded Age, when robber barons hoarded the wealth while workers were stuck in poverty, is he just blowing smoke? That depends, says Cecil Adams in the Chicago Reader, on what you mean by "approaching" and what you mean by "Gilded Age." Adams does the math and puts Krugman's rhetoric in perspective. Full story

Related:Jay Rosen on Krugman's New Year's Resolutions

• The opposite of the Gilded Age may be Britain's experiment in state-sponsored child care, a merger of big government and family values. Since the Labour party took power in Britain in 1997, it has increased spending on children by 64%, reports The Economist. Under the auspices of Sure Start, Britain's version of the U.S.' Head Start, the British government funds nurseries, children's centers, and home visits for poor children, and in 2004 will expand state nursery care to cover all children through the age of three. What remains unclear, The Economist says, is whether "the British government's splurge on children" encourages lax parenting, whether incentives for working mothers are bad for parenting, and whether Sure Start succeeds in closing the gap for victims of parental neglect. Full story

Elsewhere in The Economist: Haiti's sad bicentennial

• Their fur is soft; their chests are like "brick." The sled dogs of the Inuit in Northwestern Greenland are as strong as they are timeless. "The Inuit's connection to their dogs is one of the world's oldest and most complex human-animal partnerships," writes John F. Ross, on assignment in Greenland for the Smithsonian. Unlike Inuit farther south in Canada and Alaska, Polar Inuit have always resisted replacing the sled dog, or qimmiq, with the snowmobile. As Ross finds, that may be about to change. Excerpt and PDF of story
• Two people you may not have heard of face daunting to-do lists for 2004. Mark McClellan, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, will preside over two of the most contentious medical issues of the new year—the over-the-counter "morning after" pill and the acquisition of prescription drugs from Canada. Mowaffak al-Rubaie—British-educated physician and former spokesman for Iraq's terrorist Dawa Party—is one of the most politically connected members of the Iraqi Governing Council. He's already attended President Bush's Thanksgiving drop-in and interrogated Saddam Hussein. He'll have even more to do in the new year. McClellan and al-Rubaie are among Newsweek's people to watch in 2004. Full story

Related:Dr. al-Rubaie talks to CBS' 60 Minutes about seeing Saddam

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.