Some opening lines grab you and just grip your soul as a reader. I recently sat down to reread White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and was humbled by the beauty and the provoking thought contained within its opening line. In the last year, I have discovered the beauty of Dostoyevsky, yet many of his opening works do not begin with the mighty hooks of some other novels, but his novella White Nights begins with this marvelous line:
“It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!…”
While he does not detail the marvelous nature of the stars that he looks at, the recollection that comes into the shared memory of any reader who remembers nights out under the brightest heavens can be recalled instantly. Echoing the biblical sentiment that “The heavens declare the glory of God.” How could there be such grumbling and malice in the world? How could there be arrogance and haughty people who are permitted to walk under the majestic night sky where the stars play the orchestra of God’s grandeur, greater than Mozart and louder than Rachmaninoff?
He affirms that this question is youthful, but not youthful in a sense of foolishness or in a sense of misunderstanding, but in a sense of childlike faith that only children and young people can have, where their innocence has not yet dulled their senses to the brightness of the grandeur of creation.
Each week, I have the husbandly duties of taking our trash to the road, and as of late, I have been inviting along my three-year-old to join me. This takes what has been a boring and rather tedious chore and has turned it into an adventure of bravery, heroics, and strength of character. He often begins the journey of walking to the trash can in fear of the ants, bugs, squirrels, and other creeping things that prowl in the night, and with a call to bravery, we march forth and achieve our task. We will often cast our gaze into the heavens and see the night sky, and he looks for the moon and the brightest stars and planets, and with childlike wonder, he is enamored.
I ask, “Who made you?”
“God.”
“Who made the stars?”
“God.”
He has not tired or grown complacent at the little adventures. He does not walk begrudgingly forward at the chore set before him, but faces it head-on with bravery and joy. And when we return to the house, we recount to a fair maiden, or as he calls her, Mama, all the adventures that we have been on.
The heavens for him have not grown boring or stale. The wonders of this world have not pressed him down, and his view of it all enables me to be set free from my own grumbling. This youthful memory and rekindling of joy reminds me of the Chesterton quote about God and children:
“A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
“But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
“Heaven may be more of a home than we think, and there may be a real sense in which the sun and moon are the children of God.”
How can we grumble and complain when the God of the heavens is shouting out His glory to all of us in this world in the magnificence of the heavens above us? How can we walk and grumble about the simple nightly tasks given to us when the world in which we live, move, and have our existence is one so filled with glory and wonder that we can and should rejoice in the midst of it all?
The unnamed lonely man in White Nights is echoing the heart of Dostoyevsky and Chesterton, that we would be well reminded to remember the Creator and His glory and grandeur in the simple wonders of a night sky. In Genesis 1, we have God speaking and light coming into existence, and the stars that cause us to marvel and cause some of the greatest minds that we have on earth to dedicate their entire lives to studying and understanding the nature of the vastness of the heavens. In the account of creation, it is but an addition: “And He made the stars.”
So the next time you are looking at the night sky, pause and reflect, and ask yourself, “How could I be ill-tempered in a playground like this? How could I dread when I live in this wonderful world?” And rejoice that not only can you know the Creator in general through His creation, but personally through the Son of God, who upholds all of the heavens with His power.