As the day ebbed into the night, and nocturnal transmissions fell upon deaf ears a man sat alone. Though very much alone, that man was accompanied by silent and invisible companions - companions who shared in his nihility of understanding. Staring at the vacuous night sky, he gazed at the stark contrast – the brilliance of the stars versus the obscurity and blackness of the surrounding universe. On earth the only lights that remained lit belonged to those whose desire to live was nothing more than a fear to die. Neoteric insomniacs, they feared silent slumber for it carried forth the intangible. And it would seem that he whose lights were out feared not the intangible, though their thoughtless slumber revealed far more. Unlike the lit, these somnolents had not the capacity to fear the black and intangible, and therefore had merely accepted their fate, their truth. That man though awake, sat without illumination all save the stars, all the while marveling at their beauty and profusion.

The man stared at the innumerable stars and he could not help but stand in awe of their symbolic beauty. He lived in an age where yesterday’s discoveries were soon antiquated by tomorrow’s generation. The stars and beyond were, to him, virgin territories, thus he believed that their stellar lights carried with them an untapped enlightenment. At this time, however, his light was nothing but the reflection of the stars. On this day, on this hill, he sat as he had many times before, awaiting the explanation of his existence.

This man, who doubted the facets of ecclesiastical conformity that shaped his being, was borne by dogma and raised by beliefs. It was those very beliefs that troubled him now. They taught that the light was not something to be sought, for it was ever encompassing. If this was the truth, however, why was the universe, his universe, so very dark? Why was it that the only light which was discernible to his eyes, that of the stars? This man sat for days on end, blinded by the light, utterly confounded by the darkness. His was a thirst for truth not easily sated by conventional means, for it was convention itself that convened to him this sense of unavoidable damnation. To him life was a riddle, and sphinx-like as it was, it perplexed him. For he was seeking an answer from that one thing which alone could not yield a tangible answer – the intangible.

He spoke to himself yet said nothing, for the mindful remarks that he made were carefully silenced so as not to be heard. For if he was to be heard, he would be chastised vehemently as a non-believer. The unlit believed in conformity, and it is because of this conformity that they were able to sleep at night. This man however needed to believe that there was something else out there. He knew not what it was, only that he would sacrifice his entire life to discover its source. That he was seeking an unseen goal was blatantly obvious to the man, but the fact that the discovery of the truth, which he had sought for so very long, would remain unseen, eluded him.

What was this truth that was to be found in the stellar lights? They seemed, to the man, like droplets of white paint strewn onto the pitch-black caelian canvas, polar opposites, black versus white. So too was the man. Alone he sat on that hill, alone he felt in the world. He wondered if there was another troubled soul in search for that which the man had yet to find.

As was the fashion, night brought the stars, and on the tails of the stars rode the man’s deep introspection. However, on this particular night, the pitch-black canvas of the night sky was grayed by an enormous cloud, which drifted past the man like a behemoth ship, silently skulking through the night sky. This cloudbank entirely obscured the stellar lights, its seemingly boundless breadth paralleled only by its opacity. As the man physically could no longer see his stellar companions, he was forced to turn his glance elsewhere. Elsewhere was the valley that stood beneath him. The many colored lights masked the darkness inherent in the store windows. The red, blue, and green of the lights hid, like a ghastly secret, the true blackness of the partially unlit homes. Partially, for in one home a solitary window was lit by some unknown radiance.

The homes of the valley below appeared to have been culled by some unseen plow, neatly ordered into row upon ordered row of residence. Here picket fences, baseball, and shattered regret were the crosses which the denizens of the valley were forced to bear. Standing alone above the maddening crowd of ordered rows was an illuminated, hoary steeple. This decrepit steeple was once home to a cross, yet like all things in this valley disrepair fell upon it like a slow, but inevitable cancer. Once home to the cross, the only sign of life at this point in time was a glow, a light, a solitary candle burning in the window.

This man looked at the solitary candle and imagined the church’s steeple, now dimly lit, bathed in radiance during the daylight hours. Now, however, it remained woefully silent. He stared at the candle with such earnest, that even when the man shut his eyes to attain perfect darkness, the image of the candle’s flame appeared – burnt into his eyes, burnt into his soul.

As the man’s vision of the candle faded, he directed his sight to the ordered rows of homes, which although chiefly dark, were illuminated by solitary lights on solitary posts. These single lights acted as the only illumination in the black night, as the stars were all but invisible. At this very moment, a violent explosion forced the man to tear his sight away from the silent valley to the city further down the hill. Fireworks defamed the night – false light jettisoned into the sky by those whose gaudy and illicit illumination was the result of the incineration of some dispensable shell. The blinding light created by the white-hot phosphorus and the deafening noise that now reverberated through the man’s skull angered him to a frightening degree. The serenity of his hill had been compromised and he would not soon forget the city’s abhorrent, counterfeit light.

Above the blinded were the lit, whose fear of dying capacitated their will to live. The lit, however, were far better off than the blinded, because they had the one watershed element that the blind sorely lacked – hope. It was this hope, in something more, some greater being, some greater truth to explain the many intangibles which continued to frighten the lit, that separated them from the blind. The light remains on not only in their minds and souls, but their solitary room in which they ruminate about the unknown, unseen, unutterable. The lit felt that if they let the cold, dark graces of slumber fall upon them, they would slip into an unconscious euphoric state. This euphoria would lead them to an insouciant view of the life that is set before them, and in the end the somnolents would become nothing more than the blind. Losing the light was the one and only thing that the lit feared.

The last group, though their appellation indeed is similar, is impossible to rank with the blind and the lit. The unlit were in the insouciant state the lit feared, for they had no qualms concerning their existence. They had accepted that there was in fact some greater truth, but they cared not what it was. The lack of concern over their existence troubled this man so very much, that he sometimes believed them to be as pitiable as the blinded, for they had created their Truth to be in their likeness. Because of this, the entire valley was unlit, unilluminated, all save the steeple.

The man sat there on his hill staring down at the valley and city below him, and he focused on the steeple of the church where a single candle was burning low. Inside he knew there was a man, lit not by the candle, but by a greater truth, who had sat on this hill many years before. It was on this hill which that man learned that the light comes not from candles or stars, but from the inner truth which one holds deep inside like a dying breath. As the man, who at present sat on the hill, thought about everything that had just been revealed in his epiphany, the clouds shifted in such a way that now there were two lights visible – that of the solitary candle in the steeple, and the full radiant moon. He knew the Moon’s full, yet false light was a result of the resplendence of a star, the Sun, yet it was the Moon, not the Sun which stood out this night as the brightest. The Moon’s was nothing more than a false light. He welcomed it though, for it was still a light in his unlit world.