CÉLINE, BLAKE, AND THE FATE WE CARRY
Two visionary writers offer their glimpse into the labyrinth – Céline, with his bitter understanding of human suffering, sees us as winter’s children condemned to eternal seeking, while Blake’s lyrical poiesis splits souls between hope and hopelessness. Where Blake saw the mark of grace or damnation stamped on an infant’s soul, Céline saw us blind, wandering through a universe stripped of meaning.
Both believe we are our fates, and we become, as they were, born to the night:
‘Our life is a journey
Through winter and night,
We look for our way
In a sky without light.”
Journey to the End of the Night/ Voyage au bout de la nuit/ 1932
‘Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.’
William Blake/ Auguries of Innocence/ 1863
Both Céline and Blake expose an eternal truth – we are all born carrying our endings within us.
Both remind me of Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian/ Sinuhe egyptiläinen/ 1945 (which follows Sinuhe, a physician in ancient Egypt) as he narrates his life’s journey – marked by loss, disillusionment, and a search for meaning amid chaos.
While The Egyptian is stylistically divergent from Céline’s terse, modern writing, there are moments where Sinuhe’s reflections echo the same sense of a weary, shadowed pilgrimage through life:
‘I, Sinuhe, am a man grown old and weary, without hope and without purpose, and all my days have been in vain. I have wandered through many lands and seen the works of men, and all is emptiness.’
Or here, Sinuhe’s despair after losing everything:
‘The world was dark about me, and my heart was sick with the sickness of death. I walked alone, and the stars gave no light’
The writing is Waltari’s, but the mood is Celine’s – life as a bleak, directionless trek.
Where Waltari and Céline trudge alone, Blake sees the crowds – some kissed by dawn, others chased away from it. He spins the Rota Fortunae but with a crueler grace: destiny is not just blind, it is capricious, a croupier at a table rigged from the start.
What unites them, these three men, separated by time, temperament and culture? Sinuhe’s world without meaning is Céline’s lightless sky, and both are Blake’s endless night.
This is a trinity of shadows, each man, like all of us, a moth pinned to the same board, wings fluttering against the inevitable.
three films, three stories of man against the inevitable