the child who taught the sun to be afraid of the dark

One day I was thinking that if we could live from the perspective of the sun, we wouldn’t know what darkness is. Everything that we could lay our eyes upon would be well lit (maybe clouds and atmospheres could cause some blur because of the diffraction?). This story came out while trying to explore this concept.

(The original story is in Italian, this version has been translated using DeepL and then manually revised)

the story

The sun blazed, huge, boundless, with its tongues of fire in the vacuum of space. The planets danced placidly around it. It looked with satisfaction at the small pebbles scattered here and there. Everything stretched out around it and it was happy about it, the way the rocks on the moon reflected its glow, the shimmer of a gas cloud just beyond. It was a simple, grand life, a modest existence.

“Hello sun”

A subtle little voice diverted it from its thoughts. A little boy sat in the middle of a meadow. He kept his eyes closed, but his face turned toward the sky.

“Hi little child,” replied the sun.

“What are you doing?” the child’s expression was intrigued.

“Contemplating planets, I like to see them move, align and then say goodbye until the next turn”

The child looked thoughtful, perhaps he had never seen the other planets.

“What do you do instead?”

“Mmmhh” silence “I was standing here, the light is warm, then I wondered what it’s like to be up there all the time”

‘Up there,’ what a funny concept.

“Don’t you get bored, all the time alone? Don’t you have any friends?-

‘Alone,’ it had never thought of being alone; after all, it needed no one. The movement of the planets kept it company. It had never looked away from the system really. Sometimes it had wondered how it felt about those luminous dots that crowded the space in every direction. There was so much beauty around it, so close at hand, it didn’t need anything else. When it felt down it usually watched the ice melt, it loved it. Did it prefer the melting ice or the movement of clouds? Hard to say.

“No, I don’t have any friends, but I enjoy watching the things that happen around me”

“I understand you, I like it too, I watch the birds flying. It’s also nice at night, my window looks out into the woods and I can hear the animals. Every now and then I can see some-

“What is the night?”

“It’s when you disappear, during the day you go up in the sky and then you leave”

It reflected on those words. From its point of view it actually made sense. Before long the child would disappear from his sight only to reappear after a few hours. So they had to call it ‘night’ when they were hidden from it. Fascinating.

“Describe the night” now the sun was intrigued.

“It’s dark and cold. You can’t see much, just a few silhouettes, and it’s all scary when you can’t quite figure out what it is”

“Darkness, what is darkness?”

The child seemed amused by the tone of the sun. “It is when there is no light, like a shadow, but covering everything”

What did he mean by the absence of light?

“Show me a shadow, please”

The child lowered his gaze for a moment, thinking about what to do.

“There, now my face is in the shade!” he said in a satisfied tone, raising his hands in front of his face to shield it from the last rays of the evening sun.

The sun could see the illuminated palms, but it could not know what they were hiding. According to what the child said, his face must now look different, but he could not figure out how.

“Tell me more, how are things in the dark?”

“They’re all black, and you’re not sure what you’re looking at. One time I saw my jacket moving on the chair and I thought it was a vicious animal, it also had evil eyes, then my dad turned on the light and they were the buttons, but you never know in the dark”

So objects lost their identity in the dark. It still did not fully grasp the idea, but it felt it had to understand more. What did it mean to be unsure of what he was seeing? Everything it had observed in its life was there, crystal clear, how could a jacket become a beast?

“My parents don’t want me to stay out after dark, good night sun”

Its thoughts were interrupted by the child’s words just as the child disappeared from its sight.

‘Good night,’ those words resounded in its mind. Maybe at that very instant the child was turning into something else with the favor of darkness, something frightening that it would never have known and with the child the whole hidden half of that planet, and all the other planets and every single particle of dust looked at it placidly mocking it and keeping who knows what terrible face hidden from it. And as its gaze jumped from one planet to another, suddenly it felt the urge to raise its eyes to the stars and for the first time it noticed that infinite blackness in which each of them was immersed and its mind filled it with fierce and incomprehensible animals and for the first time that night the sun felt small and lost in the universe.

the end