The Light

The Curator is pleased to admit you for a fourteenth viewing.

You will come in out of the storm onto a sea-cut lighthouse rock given over to a watch that never ends, all salt and oil and stopped tide-clocks and the great lamp turning in the dark, where every soul who feared being spare, with no one to need them, is taken up onto the watch at last, leaned upon and kept. There is a place waiting for you at the lamp, a name in the log and the whole black sea depending on your light, and the keeping of the rock drawn close around you, and a watch that has learned by heart the one soul it could not do without. One reminder, with our compliments: the way off is real, and this time it asks whether you can walk away needed by no one, keep no light and leave no name in the log, and go down to the boat and the cold open water to an ending that is wholly your own.