Inside the chamber of the tumulus of Newgrange our guide turns off all the light. Darkness is then complete. She does it so that we can experience the gradual illumination of the room as the rising sun breaks the dawn of the winter solstice every year. The artificial electric setup does the trick. The chamber goes from dark to light to dark again in the matter of a few seconds. The original experience lasts a bit longer - a few minutes - and repeats itself for a few days around the winter solstice, reaching its maximum, in terms of brightness and duration, precisely at dawn on December 21st. It is an event worth attending to and there exists the so-called solstice lottery that every year offers the possibility to fifty selected people to witness the real deal.
The experience of being in that chamber in total darkness was interesting (even though it would have been far more so had I not been in the company of a dozen more visitors) but above all it was timely, being as I was those days reading Murakami's masterpiece The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. For a few seconds I was down in a cave below the ground in complete blackness, getting a minuscule flavour of what Lieutenant Mamiya and Toru Okada both went through down in their wells. And, just as those fictional characters, I was going through the process of receiving the rays of a blinding light for an instant, letting darkness recede if only for a moment. You can call this a happy coincidence - I would call it so myself - but I can't help thinking there may be some more to it.
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