The Light on the Stairs

 

He stopped, transfixed, on the stairs. Something about the window- the way the light cascaded through its multicolored panels and pooled at his feet on the carpet staircase had caught his attention this morning that hadn’t been there before. No, it must’ve been there the whole time- it was just that he hadn’t seen it until this morning. Green, red, yellow, blue, and purple light spread itself into a divine tapestry and here he was standing right in the middle of it, totally unaware of its existence. How could he have been so blind?

And then, when the blame crept into his mind, it held the door open for its good friend and companion, worry, to follow behind. And he thought, oh God. What if this has ruined the world for me? What if my eyes are cursed to judge all that they see by this impossible rubric? For truly, he had known as soon as he set eyes upon the masterpiece that nothing could possibly compare to it. And at this thought, this realization, he despaired.

Because this is what the Romantics got wrong. There is such a thing as absolute beauty, and once it has been seen (if the near-ecstatic experience he had just undergone/was undergoing/would in the future undergo could be summed up as simply as that vulgar, base word seeing) it cannot be forgotten. And there is nothing that can compare. It saps the rose of its red blush, it steals from the ocean its cerulean gems. He who has gazed upon it can do naught but curse god and die.

So, standing there on the first floor landing of his sumptuously carpeted stairs, he despaired. What flashed before his blighted (blessed) eyes was not a sequence of memories, but a sequence of plans, of ideas, of hopes, of aspirations. Of all the things which he had planned to do on that useful abstraction one day or its close corollary someday soon. To marry. To own land. To retire. To love, and to be loved in return.

And always before his eyes was the light, that impossible inevitability which danced over his unsocked feet. It rose as he watched it, so that it seemed to encompass the whole of the landing, then the entire stairway, then his vision of the home was replaced by the light, and it shook and vibrated and heaved before him, and grew- how was this possible- more intense, more dazzling, more colorful. Larger and still larger, until it seemed that all that was, was the light, and that which was not the light, was not. Greater and still greater, brighter and still brighter, always with that quality of impossible beauty.

The colors began to expand into each other now, and before his eyes, red into green leaving yellow, until all merged (beginning at the edges and cascading inward like a whitecap) into purest, brilliant white light. It grew brighter then, and burned hotter, until it seemed that he would surely be burned up, or blinded, or both. Then, just when the end seemed impossible to avert, the white before his eyes became darkest, pitch black and he felt his body collapse.