I sit in the dark room, or rather not dark, for a few candles wrest the space, a circle of light, from the world of dark­ness. There is the great dark, and there is the small circle of light, beside which the great dark­ness, for all its size, is dwarfed. Which of them, I won­der, is the stronger?

The prac­tice is simple: hours ago, from one large candle, someone began a gar­land of light made of slender tapers, and the task is to keep it, pass it on, light the flame from the candle before it, keep it, secure the han­dover, pass it on. We, the keep­ers of the light, relieve one anoth­er, and the bright­ness is unbroken. The candle of the one who went before me is still burn­ing, only a dwind­ling stub by now, it is true, but it still gives light. Boldly I light my own candle from its flame, now two are shin­ing, and these small lights, the lights of each single candle, once added togeth­er, are no longer light at all but bright­ness. The smal­ler one dwindles, wanes, its light dies down, the wax-body shrinks and so does the flame, then it flares one last time, smoke rises, and its light fades bey­ond recall. I have wit­nessed a true meta­morph­os­is: the wax from who knows where did not merely change its state of mat­ter, as water turns to vapour, but was trans­muted, the coarse mat­ter became pure energy, the candle turned wholly into light.

The other candle's bright­ness remains, the gar­land of light is immor­tal. And when must the bright­ness be kept? In the dark­ness, nat­ur­ally. If dark­ness is not the mas­ter, then it is really the bright­ness that keeps us. Now the situ­ation seems reversed, as if I were keep­ing the light, though in fact the light is play­ing with me.

And play it does, for the candle's flame now flares up, now shrinks, at one moment dwindles to blue, at anoth­er rears up in golden light. At times it burns the wick into a sooty hook, and when the soot drops, the flame flares up again. Or it shines without a tremor, then flick­ers, begins to dance, and seems to tear itself free of its source, the wick.

The tapers lie in a little heap, a mere hand­ful, in a small bas­ket, and that is where I took mine from too. They are cal­ib­rated candles, a span long, very thin, and they burn for half an hour. One would think that in the middle of the night time passes slowly, but no, it pos­it­ively flies. The candle burns slowly, and time flies swiftly. Could it be that the candle is burn­ing up the time around it?

Now it seems to burn faster, sud­denly a good two fin­gers' width of it is gone, then its wan­ing slows, and as I gaze at the candle I come to real­ise that it is not the candle I see but bright­ness itself. From the object I have arrived at the idea. Seen like this, the light is quite dif­fer­ent, it reveals more of itself, it is warm­er, and pre­cious, as though it were pure gold trick­ling from the flame in every dir­ec­tion. Sud­denly the sight of the candle splits in two, now two flames are flick­er­ing, two tapers stand planted in the sand. This double vis­ion soon settles back into the sight of the one true candle, and yet it seems the candle's flame did not mul­tiply by chance. Per­haps so that it might make its home in me?

I might think that I feed the light, when in fact the candle's light feeds me. Soul-fire, candle-light, Sun­light… everything is con­nec­ted with everything. To feed on light – this is not the work of the stom­ach, this is not tak­ing in bal­last, no. Light is the noblest qual­ity, the subtle food of con­scious­ness and the soul, the ambro­sia of the gods.

Mean­while time passes and my candle wanes – but am I grow­ing any fat­ter? Am I filling up with bright­ness? And anxi­ety seizes me, soon I am huddled before the ever-shrink­ing stub, because my relief is late, and later still. I cast spells on the bright­ness, I beg my candle to burn more slowly, but it only goes on wan­ing… I, a fal­lible man, err, but the ideal man does not err. I feared the changeover would come too late and the chain of light would break, but my relief has arrived, and I may go. An ideal situ­ation: even if we go, the bright­ness stays here, and it will always have a keep­er.

In the end, the keep­ing of the light found its true mean­ing at sun­rise – we had only been keep­ing the lamp, but at the break of dawn the Sun rose radi­ant, the source of all lights…