This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers (2020)
Jeff Sharlet (1972)
320 pages
In her solo work and as part of the group Dead Can Dance, the wonderful musician Lisa Gerrard’s bewitching and incantatory voice animates her many amazing songs. Among them, her performance of the melancholy piece Sanvean: I Am Your Shadow has always created in me one of two wildly disparate moods: I experience it either as an exaltation of the first dawn of the first human on Earth (for whatever reason visualized as the closing scene of George Lucas’ film THX-1138), or as a requiem to the world, performed as the first explosions of a global, thermonuclear holocaust mushroom into the sky. Somehow Gerrard’s powerful voice and the rich melody manage to engender, in one song, a profound sense of either hope or devastation.
In reading author and journalist Jeff Sharlet’s This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers, consisting of a set of intensely personal portraits of people he has met in his recent travels, I’ve discovered this same quality to evoke powerful and quite opposite feelings.
Sharlet opens by explaining that the book grew out of accidental meetings with random people as he drove regularly through the night between his hometown and that of his ill father, worked late at night public places, or traveled on organized reporting trips. He used the camera on his phone to take pictures of strangers he met, to which he then added accounts of his discussions with them. Thus, he writes, out of
two years of reporting, … this is a book of other people’s lives, lives that became, for a moment – the duration of a snapshot – my life, too.” (5)
In some cases, his accounts constitute extended captions to the accompanying picture, a couple-few paragraphs; in a few others, however, he provides a deeper, more extensive narrative.
In these encounters, he asks those he meets about their lives in a clear-eyed and direct manner, but, critically, without any hint of condescension or rejection. For all the natural and inquisitive questions Sharlet asks, he has the compassion and awareness to not ask that last question, the one that shifts from engaging fairly with someone, to humiliating them – transforming them from a human being into an oddity in a zoo.
The result is a series of portraits of people who live at or, more often, beyond the margins of society: people working the night shift, hiding from ‘normal’ society or wandering the alleys, visible but somehow at the same time easily overlooked and ignored. Instead of passing on by, however, eyes averted or giving a perfunctory nod, Sharlet has stopped to not only acknowledge but engage these strangers.
And here, then, the challenge of this book, the disparate emotions experienced while reading it. For, on the one hand, these portraits too often reveal the seemingly boundless depth of our society’s inhumanity: our willingness to allow entire segments of the population to be left behind, whether as homeless or scraping by at a low paying job to stay just ahead of the threat of homelessness – or worse to violently suppress them as a dangerous other. On the other hand, we witness the intense humanity of these lives, the hopes and desires Sharlet discovers even in people with lives filled with struggle and heartache. As I read Sharlet’s descriptions of the people he met, my feelings oscillated between these poles of despairing the inhumanity of their situations and celebrating their powerful humanity.
Granted, Sharlet’s vignettes about these strangers provide readers a certain distance. We are spared those potential aspects of such encounters that might trigger the typical response of turning away – the smell of a life on the streets, the slightly unsteady or even frenzied look in an eye; through Sharlet, we are able to look closer, to follow along as he engages with people, without the threat of directly facing that reality. But, not having these strangers in front of us, in person, we do miss out on the opportunity for the more fundamental connection that engaging someone in person allows; we must rely on Sharlet’s ability to build that connection for us, through his prose – which he does brilliantly, even if it can’t completely make up for not being there. Perhaps, though, it’s the best possible compromise for all those readers unlikely, for whatever reason, to actually go out and meet such strangers, as Sharlet has.
Sharlet hints at this connection he is providing readers in an epigraph to the book that comments on the quality of pictures a phone camera can take (versus a professional one). Reading that note again after completing the book, it captures well the nature of his role in writing the vignettes of the people he has met.
The phone camera comes close enough for the viewer to guess [at what I saw that made me snap the picture], and in between that guess and the light-as-it-was stands me. The mediation. Perfect camera tech creates the illusion of unmediated vision. That amazing picture that looks like it’s real? That’s a deception. This – sort of what it looked like, something like what I saw, something like what I felt – is the truth.
This mediation is what readers get, not only in the photos Sharlet includes of the people he encounters, but more importantly in the accompanying prose of his discussions with them, the discoveries that ensue. “The deception,” in this case, would be the “perfect” newspaper or magazine article that describes the challenges of working the night shift, or living on skid row, or being caught up in social support services: readers learn some facts, but can miss the humanity. Instead, Sharlet’s narrative presents us individuals, distinct people, with particular histories; yes, with challenges, but also hopes and, more critically, the drive to live on one more day, and then one more.
There is no denying, however, the powerful effect on readers of Sharlet’s narrative, particularly of his encounters with the people struggling most to carry on. And, toward the end of the book, he acknowledges how what he has seen, heard and experienced has irrevocably impacted him: the growing recognition of the fragility of our lives, and that the world, our civilization, “is like an ocean and our seemingly stable lives are little boats we mistake for land.” (288)
Beyond the individual impact he felt, came the implications of the reality he discovered for his role as a parent. Considering what he has seen of the precarious nature of so many lives, he acknowledges the fear he is left with, one that must needs lurk in any parent’s heart:
I don’t have the words: The fear that comes with the love that as soon as you have a child you can lose the child, that you can do all the right things and still it won’t matter.” (288)
These words may seem obvious read here, in isolation, but read them late in Sharlet’s book and they become much more freighted with a profound melancholy.
This fear that Sharlet describes for his children’s future recalls an exchange in Miranda July’s novel The First Bad Man. The protagonist, after her friend’s challenging pregnancy and then delivery, meets with the attending physician; she wants to understand the potential impact on the baby of what has happened during the pregnancy, but the physician gives little solace:
“… as with any child, you won’t know if he can run until he runs.”
“Okay, I see. And besides running? Should we keep an eye out for anything in the future?”
“Oh, the future, I see.” A shadow fell over the doctor’s face. “You’re wondering if your son will get cancer? Or be hit by a car? Or be bipolar? Or have autism? Or drug problems? I don’t know, I’m not a psychic. Welcome to parenthood.” He swiveled and walked away.
Perhaps not the best bed-side manner, but the hard reality, nonetheless.
And the author Jennifer Senior also brilliantly captured this fear for our children’s future, during an interview on Fresh Air (4 February 2014) for her book on parenthood All Joy and No Fun:
I think Christopher Hitchens described having kids as 'your heart running around in somebody else's body,' and that feeling is so powerful it's almost scary, because there's almost like an implied sense of loss about it, it's like you love somebody so much that you are almost automatically afraid of losing them, that this connection is so deep that you can't think of that connection without thinking of that connection being broken.
For some in Sharlet’s book that “loss” is the death of their beloved child; for others, however, it is the similar, terrible fate of losing a child who has slid irrecoverably beyond the margins of society. (Complete quote here.)
In This Brilliant Darkness, Sharlet invites us to consider such fears squarely, by meeting people who those with “stable lives” too often push out of consciousness – and asks that we look them squarely in the eye. In writing filled with deep compassion but without a sugar-coating of the reality, he reveals the hard edges of the society we’ve created, and the humanity of the people who struggle to survive out along, and beyond, its edges.
Other notes and information:
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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