All Souls Day and Dziady · Church, Candles, Forefathers' Eve, the Full Story

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Two nights ago a table was set in a wooden house, and a place was left empty, and a woman said her father's name to a chair. Tonight, I am picturing somebody walking past that same imagined house, a man with a different word for what is happening inside it. He is a priest. He has a black coat and a book and a parish, and it is the first days of November, and he has just come from saying the office for the dead in a cold church, and on his way home in the dark he passes a farmhouse with a candle in the window that is not normally in the window, and he knows exactly what it means, and he keeps walking.

He does not stop, and he does not knock, and he does not go in and overturn the plate. He will mention it in a sermon, perhaps, in a general way. He may write a letter to his bishop, if he is the kind of priest who writes letters, saying that the people in his parish are still doing the thing their grandparents did. And tomorrow he will stand in the church and read the names of the dead of the parish, from a list, out loud, while candles burn, and the same people who set the table last night will be there in the pews, and nobody will find any of this strange. That is tonight.

Not the custom. What was done with the custom, by the people who could write, over a thousand years. How a farmhouse night got a second name, and then a third, and then a poem, and how the poem became a country, and how the candle in the window turned into a hundred thousand candles on a hillside, which is what the night looks like now if you drive past a burial ground in that part of the world on the first of November. If you would rather listen with the screen off, this whole season is on the podcast, free, same night. And if this carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next night will be waiting for you when you need it.

I said two nights ago that I would tell you when a thing was old and when it was only probably old. Tonight the rule is almost the reverse. Almost everything tonight has a date. The church wrote its own history down with a care that no farmhouse ever did, and the poet's manuscripts are in a library, and the theatre whose production was closed in the winter of nineteen sixty eight kept its records. Tonight is the well documented half of a story whose first half is a candle and a plate.

And because it is documented, I can promise you more than usual. I can tell you which abbot decided that the second of November would belong to the dead, and roughly when, and why. I can tell you what the church's own men wrote when they went into these villages and found the table set, and I can tell you they wrote it more than once across four hundred years, which is the measure of how completely they failed to clear it. I can tell you about a young man in exile who put the whole farmhouse night into a play, and what the play says, and who the ghosts in it are. And I can tell you about one night in a theatre, and one closed door, and what came through it.

What I cannot tell you is whether any of it changed what happened at the table. My honest guess, which I will come back to at the end, is that it did not. The church gave the night a name and a date and a place in its book. The poet gave it a play. The state gave it a crisis.

And the woman in the farmhouse went on turning the spoon down. Settle in. The candle two nights ago was in a window. Tonight there are two candles, and by the end of the night you will know why the second one is on a grave.

Begin with the priest, because he is the person tonight is about, and he has been made into a villain so often that it is worth meeting him properly. He is not a stranger. In the villages where the grandfathers were fed, in the centuries when the feeding was recorded, the priest was almost always a local man, or a man from the next district, who spoke the language of the house and had eaten the same bread. He had been to a seminary in a town, and had come back with a book and a way of speaking that the village found slightly comic, and he lived in a house next to the church that was a little better than the other houses, and he baptised the children and married the couples and buried the dead. He buried the dead.

That is the thing to hold onto. Every one of the grandfathers called by name at that table had been put in the ground by a man like this one, with the words of the church said over the grave, and the family standing by, and nobody objecting. So when he passes the house with the candle in the window, he is not passing a pagan enclave. He is passing his own parishioners, whose dead he buried, doing something his church has never quite approved of and has never been able to stop. And here is a thing about that priest that nobody who tells the story of the church against the custom ever mentions.

He has eaten at the table himself. Not the autumn table. The other one. Because in these lands, when a person died and was buried, the family went home from the grave and sat down to a meal, and the priest came too, and sat at the head of it, and said grace over it, and ate. The funeral meal.

It has a name in every one of these languages and the names are old, and it is the same sweet wheat, the same bread, the same drink, the same empty place set for the person who has just been put in the ground, and in some accounts the same first spoonful set aside before anyone eats. The church did not object to it. The church, as often as not, presided over it. A meal for the dead on the day of the death, with the priest at the table, was a Christian funeral. A meal for the dead on a fixed night in the autumn, with no priest, was a pagan survival.

The food was identical. The difference was who was invited and which day it was. I give you that not to score a point against the church, which was doing what churches do, but because it tells you how thin the wall was. The priest who walked past the candle had, a month before, said grace over the same wheat at a table with the same empty place. He was not looking at a foreign religion through a window.

He was looking at his own funeral dinner, held on a night he had not been asked to. What does he think it is? That depends on the century, and the difference across the centuries is the whole story of tonight. In the early centuries, in the years right after the conversion of any given district, the church's men wrote about the feeding of the dead as what it plainly was to them: the old religion, still going, in the open, on a fixed night. Their sermons call it a devil's feast.

They name the foods. They say it is done for the dead under the old word for the dead, and that the people doing it are, whatever they say about themselves, still worshipping what their fathers worshipped. That is the voice you heard two nights ago in the sermons of the twelfth century. Hostile, specific, and helpless. Then, slowly, over a very long time, the voice changes.

By the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, the complaint is less about demons and more about disorder. The church's councils in the Polish and Lithuanian lands pass statutes about the feasts held at graves, and what they object to is the drinking, the singing, the fact that it goes on all night, the fact that it happens on days the church has not set aside. It is a nuisance now, not a heresy. The priests want it tidied, not extinguished. And by the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, in the generation before the collectors arrived with their notebooks, the tone has shifted again, into something that is nearly affection.

The priest knows the table is set. He may have eaten at it as a boy. He reads the names of the parish dead from the pulpit the next day, and the names are the same names, and the candles in the church are the same candles, and he does not see, or chooses not to see, any contradiction, because from where he stands there is none. His church has a day for the dead. It falls at the start of November.

The people mark it. What they do the night before in their own houses is between them and their grandmothers. That last priest is the one I want you to keep in your mind tonight, because he is the truth of the thing, and he has been written out of the story by everyone who wanted a cleaner one. The church did not conquer the farmhouse night. The church did not tolerate it, exactly, either.

The church arrived, found the table set, spent a few centuries objecting, and then, in the plainest possible way, brought its own days for the dead into the same season, and after that the two of them lived in the same house like an old couple who have stopped arguing. The name it gave is Zaduszki. It is a Polish word and it means, as nearly as English can carry it, the souls' day. The day for the souls. Not the grandfathers.

The souls, which is a church word, a book word, a word that comes with a doctrine attached about where the souls are and what they need. And the fascinating thing, the thing tonight is built on, is that the people took the church's word and used it for exactly the thing they had always done, and went on turning the spoon down.

Now the dates, because they are the one thing in this whole custom that somebody actually decided, in a room, on a day, and I can tell you who. The church has two days for the dead at the start of November, and they are not the same day and they did not arrive together, and the order in which they arrived matters. The first is the first of November, and it is not, strictly, a day for the dead. It is a day for the saints. All of them.

Every saint the church has ever recognised and, more to the point, every saint it has not, the uncounted holy dead who never got a feast day of their own. The idea of a single day for all the saints is old, older than its date. In the eastern half of the church there was a day for all the martyrs by the fourth century, in the spring. In Rome, in the year six hundred and nine or six hundred and ten, a pope took the old temple of all the gods, the round one with the hole in the roof, and consecrated it as a church of Mary and all the martyrs, and gave it a feast in May. May.

Not November. That is the fact to hold onto, because everything that follows is the story of how a feast of all the saints came to be kept in the autumn. A second date came in the seven hundreds, in Rome, when another pope, by the usual account, dedicated a chapel in the great church of Saint Peter to all the saints, and set its feast on the first of November. And then, in the year eight hundred and thirty five, an emperor, the son of Charlemagne, ordered that day kept across the whole of his empire, at the urging of a pope and with the assent of his bishops, and from then on the first of November belonged to the saints everywhere the Frankish church reached, which in time was everywhere the western church reached. Why November?

Here I have to be careful, because there is a story that everybody has heard and that is probably not true, and I would rather tell you it is probably not true than let you keep it. The story is that the church moved its day for all the saints to the first of November in order to sit on top of an older festival of the dead that fell at that time of year among the peoples it was converting, in particular the peoples of the far west, in Ireland and Britain, who had a great night at the end of October. That story is told constantly. It may even be true in part. But the evidence for it is thin, the dates do not line up as neatly as the story wants them to, and the honest scholarly position at the moment is that we do not know why the first of November was chosen, and that the reason may have been as simple as the calendar of the church in Rome, which had its own reasons that had nothing to do with anyone's harvest.

And in any case, the first of November is for the saints, not the dead in general, and the saints were never fed at a table. The day for the dead is the second day, the second of November, and that one has a man attached to it. His name was Odilo, and he was the abbot of a monastery in the middle of France called Cluny, which was, in the years around the turn of the first millennium, the most influential religious house in Europe. Cluny had daughter houses everywhere. What Cluny did, the church did, a generation later.

And Odilo, in a year that the sources put close to nine hundred and ninety eight, gave an order to all the houses under his rule that the day after the feast of all the saints was to be kept as a day of prayer for all the dead. All of them. Not the saints. Not the famous. The ordinary dead, the uncounted, the ones nobody prayed for by name because nobody remembered them.

I want you to hear the echo, because I do not think it is an accident and I do not think it is a borrowing either. Two nights ago you heard a farmer at a table call the ones who have nobody to remember them. Here is an abbot in France, at the turn of the first millennium, ordering his monks to pray for the ones who have nobody to pray for them. Two entirely separate people, in two entirely separate worlds, arriving at the same act of mercy from opposite directions. There is a story about why Odilo did it, and it is a legend, written down a generation after him by a monk who admired him, and I give it to you as a legend and not as a fact.

A pilgrim coming home from Jerusalem, the story goes, was wrecked on an island, and met a hermit there, and the hermit told him that on that island there was a place where the cries of the souls of the dead could be heard, being punished, and that the demons who punished them complained, out loud, that the prayers of the monks of Cluny were snatching souls away from them faster than they could be tormented. The pilgrim went home and told Odilo, and Odilo, hearing that his monks' prayers were doing that much good, ordered that they be said for all the dead, on one day, every year. That is the story. What it tells you, whether or not a pilgrim ever met a hermit, is what people in that century thought the day was for. It was not a memorial.

It was help, sent to people who were suffering and could be reached. From Cluny the day spread the way everything from Cluny spread, house by house, diocese by diocese, over the next two centuries, until by the twelve hundreds it was kept across most of the western church, and Rome itself, slowest of all, took it onto its own calendar in the thirteen hundreds, and the second of November was the day of the souls. There is another church in this story, and I owe you its side of it, because the eastern half of these lands did not follow Rome and did not take the souls' day from Cluny, and it arrived at exactly the same place by a different road. The eastern church, the one that came to the Rus from Constantinople, has no single day for all the dead. It has several, and it puts them on Saturdays, and it calls them, in a phrase I find very hard to hear without thinking of the farmhouse, the Saturdays of the parents.

The ancestral Saturdays. Days set aside, through the year, for the dead of the family to be remembered by name at the liturgy and at the grave. And one of them falls in the autumn. In the Russian lands it sits on a Saturday in the first week of November by the modern calendar, the last week of October by the church's older one, within a week or so of the western souls' day, and the tradition attaches it to a particular prince and a particular battle. The story is that after a great battle against the steppe in the year thirteen eighty, in which an enormous number of men died, the prince who had won it asked the church to set aside a day for them, and the church chose the Saturday before the feast of the prince's own patron saint, and that day has been kept for the dead ever since.

I give you that as the tradition, because it is told everywhere and because the historians are not sure of it, and because it does not matter for tonight whether the day began with that battle or was already there and got attached to it afterward. What matters is where it landed. The eastern church, with no help from Cluny and no knowledge of Odilo, put its autumn day for the dead in the same week the farmhouse fed its grandfathers. And the spring one you have already met. The eastern church's day for the dead in spring is the day you heard about two nights ago, the one whose name might mean joy, the day the families walk to the graves with eggs.

The church put it inside its own spring, on a Tuesday in the second week after its greatest feast, on the first days its own rule allows the dead to be prayed for again, and it is on the calendar as a church day and it is kept as a farmhouse day and nobody can tell you which came first. Two churches. Two calendars. Two roads. And both of them end at the same table at the same week of the year, which tells you something about the table.

Nobody planned the meeting. I want to be very plain about that, because the tidy story wants a plan. There was no council that said, let us put the souls' day where the peasants feed their dead so that they will forget the difference. What there was, was a calendar that arrived with a day for the dead already on it, in the first week of November, and a countryside that already fed its dead at the end of the harvest, which in that climate is the end of October and the start of November, and the two dates were close enough that, over a couple of centuries, they became the same date, and the priest read the names on the second, and the family set the table on the night before, and nobody could have told you afterward which had come first.

I said the church failed to clear the table, and I want to show you the failing, because it is one of the best documented failures in the history of religion and almost nobody knows it. It runs for something like eight hundred years, and you can watch it in the church's own records, which is the only place it survives, because the people at the table did not write. Start in the lands of the Rus, in the eleven and twelve hundreds, with the sermons you have already heard about. They are the first layer, and they are the angriest. The preachers know exactly what is being done and say so, and you had their list of foods two nights ago.

What matters tonight is what happened to the sermons afterward. They were copied, and copied again, into manuscripts of the fourteen and fifteen hundreds. That preserves the complaint across centuries. It does not prove that every copied sentence reports a custom still happening exactly as before. Now go west, into the Polish lands and the great Lithuanian state that joined them, which by the fourteen hundreds covered most of the territory where the grandfathers were fed.

Here the church's argument takes a different form, and I want to give it to you accurately. It comes in statutes. The church in these lands held synods, meetings of bishops and clergy, and the synods issued rules, and the rules survive, and from the fourteen hundreds onward they include rules about the dead. Not about demons. About behaviour.

They complain of feasts held in burial grounds. They complain of drinking there, and singing, and of people spending the night among the graves. They complain that food is left. They order the priests to stop it, and to preach against it, and to refuse the sacraments to people who persist. And then, a generation later, another synod issues the same rules, in slightly different words, which is the surest sign in the world that the last set did nothing.

Then a third layer, and this is the one I find most extraordinary, because it comes from the people who tried hardest. In the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, a new kind of churchman arrived in these lands. Missionaries of the counter reformation, trained, disciplined, literate, and sent specifically into the countryside of Lithuania and the Belarusian lands to find out what the people actually believed and to correct it. They kept records. They wrote reports back to their superiors every year, describing what they had found and what they had done about it, and those reports survive, and they give us detailed descriptions of the feeding of the dead.

One witness from the same years is worth a moment, because he was not a churchman at all. In the fifteen eighties a Polish Protestant gentleman with an interest in his neighbours wrote a short Latin account of the beliefs of the people to the north of him, the Lithuanians and their cousins, and it was printed a generation later, and in among his list of their gods it names one who has charge of the souls of the dead, and says that an offering is made to him when the dead are fed, five words that tell you the feeding was ordinary enough for a gentleman two districts away to have heard of it. He was not trying to stop it. He was, in the manner of his century, collecting curiosities. He is writing about the custom, rather than preaching against it, and what he writes down is the table.

Then the missionaries, and they are the ones with the notebooks. One of them, sent round the Latvian parishes of Livonia, then held by the joined Polish and Lithuanian state, in the year sixteen hundred and six, wrote down that the souls of the dead were being fed at a feast of their own in November, the church's own month for them. They describe the table. They describe the food. They describe the calling of the dead by name and the leaving of food overnight.

They describe their own attempts to stop it, and they describe, with a kind of exhausted honesty, the people agreeing with them completely and then doing it again the following year. Four hundred years after the first sermon. Two hundred years after the first synod. Trained men, with authority, with the state behind them, in the villages, in person, and the table was still set. Here is what I think happened, and I offer it as a reading rather than a fact.

The church was arguing with the wrong thing. It thought it was arguing with a belief, and beliefs can be corrected. What it was actually arguing with was a family. The table was not a doctrine about the dead. It was the dead, at dinner.

You cannot preach a family out of setting a place for its grandmother. You can only, eventually, sit down at the table yourself, and that, in the end, is what the church did. By the seventeen hundreds the complaint has gone thin. The synods still meet, but the feasts at the graves have slipped down the list of things they trouble to forbid, and the mission reports have other worries. And the parish priest, the one from the start of tonight, walks past the candle in the window and keeps walking, and the next day reads the names, and the long argument is over, not because anyone won it, but because both sides had been, for a very long time, standing in the same kitchen.

So the church sat down at the table. Now I want to show you what it brought with it, because it did not come empty handed, and the things it brought are still on the table today. The first is the list. In the parishes of these lands there grew up a custom, and it is still kept, of families giving the priest the names of their dead before the days of the dead in November. Written on a slip of paper, or said at the door of the sacristy, with a small offering, usually money, sometimes bread.

And on the day of the souls, and in some parishes for the whole month after it, the priest reads the names out loud, from the pulpit, in front of the congregation, one after another, with a prayer between the batches. I want you to hear what that is. It is the naming from the farmhouse table, moved into the church and read by a man in a black coat from a list. The same names, three generations of them, read aloud in a room full of people, to the dead. In many parishes the reading does not stop on the souls' day.

It goes on for the whole of November, a batch of names at every evening service, so that a village hears its own dead recited, night after night, for a month, and a family whose slip was handed in late will hear its grandmother's name read on a cold Tuesday at the end of the month to a church with nine people in it. And on the first of the two days, in the afternoon, the priest goes up to the burial ground itself, in his vestments, with the whole parish behind him, and walks the paths between the graves in a procession, stopping at fixed points to pray, and blesses the graves, all of them, with water, the family ones and the strangers' ones and the ones nobody has visited in fifty years. The church's man, in the burial ground, on the day of the dead, walking from grave to grave the way the families did with their cloths and their eggs two nights ago. That gives us a resemblance, not proof that one practice was copied from the other. At home names could be called over food.

At church they were read with prayers. The same family could keep both. And the people did both. They set the table at home the night before, and they handed the slip of paper to the priest the next morning, and the same names were said twice in two rooms by two voices, and I have never found any evidence that anyone thought this was strange. The second thing the church brought was bread, and it brought it to the door.

On the souls' day, across the Polish and Lithuanian lands, bread was given to the poor at the church. Loaves, baked for the purpose, and in some districts small long rolls with a cross pressed into the top and the dead person's initials beside it, carried to the church and handed out at the gate or the porch to whoever was waiting there, and there was always somebody waiting there, because the poor know where bread is going to be. In some villages the loaf was cut at the church door into as many slices as the family had dead, and one slice went to one beggar for each name. In some parishes the bread was blessed first. In some the priest handed it out himself.

And the poor, in return, prayed for the dead of the family that had baked it, by name, if they were told the name. You have already met those people at the gate. Two nights ago they were at the burial ground, being given the food from the graves, and they had the same word as the grandfathers. Now they are at the church door, and the word has followed them, and the church is handing them the bread, and it is the same transaction. Food given in the name of the dead to somebody who will stand in for the dead.

The cemetery gate and the church porch could both be places where alms were given for the dead. The third thing the church brought was the candle, and it is the thing that eventually took over the whole night, and it gets a chapter of its own in a moment. But first the name, because I have said it and not explained it. Zaduszki. Say it slowly.

Za, which means for. Dusze, which means souls. The day that is for the souls. A church word from top to bottom. The souls are a doctrine, and in this church the doctrine is particular: the souls of the dead who are neither damned nor yet in heaven are somewhere in between, being made ready, and they can be helped, and the way to help them is prayer, and the day for that prayer is this one.

Every loaf at the porch, every name read from the pulpit, every candle on a grave is, in the church's own understanding, help sent to somebody who is waiting. Now hold that beside the farmhouse. At the table two nights ago, I pictured the dead as guests who had come a long way and needed food. That picture does not tell us every family's beliefs. In the poet's own account, the foods and songs could bring relief to souls in purgatory.

Hospitality and prayer were not necessarily two sealed worlds. The same plate could be understood in more than one way. Two ways of speaking about help for the dead. One table. And here is the thing I find genuinely moving about the souls' day, and it is the reason tonight is not a story of one thing swallowing another.

The customs and the doctrine could overlap. In the pictures we have followed, both of them, at bottom, say the same three things. The dead are still ours. The dead need something from us. And the thing they need is given once a year, by name, at the turn toward winter.

A doctrine of purgatory and a plate of sweet wheat are, on that night, doing the same job, and the people who did both knew it better than the people who wrote about either.

Now the candle, because it is where you can still see all of this with your own eyes, tonight, if you are in the right country on the right night. Drive through Poland on the first of November after dark. Choose any road that passes near a town. You will see, some distance before you reach the town, a glow on the horizon that is not the town, and that is lower than the town, and warmer, and that flickers. As you come closer it resolves into a hillside, or a walled field, or a long slope beside the road, entirely covered in small lights.

Thousands of them. In a city, hundreds of thousands. Every grave lit, some with one lamp and some with twenty, and the light coming up off the stone and the flowers and the faces of the people standing among them, so that the whole burial ground glows like a low town seen from a hill at night. That is the souls' night now, and it is the most visible religious act in that country, and the roads are full for days before it with people driving home to the towns their families are buried in, and the shops sell nothing but lamps and flowers for a week, and the cemeteries stay open all night, and people walk through them slowly in their coats, family by family, stopping at their own graves and standing, and then moving on. Some plain facts about the scale of it, because I want you to understand that this is not a quaint survival in a few villages.

The first of November is a public holiday in Poland. Offices close. Schools close. The railways put on extra trains. The roads out of the big cities are, on the day before, among the most crowded of the year, and the police publish warnings about it.

The big old burial grounds in the capital, where the great and the famous are buried alongside everyone else, have people directing the crowds at the gates, and the crowds are in the hundreds of thousands over the two days. And the lamps. There are estimates, and they are estimates, of how many grave lamps are lit in that one country on that one night, and the figures run into the tens of millions. Tens of millions of small flames in glass, in one country, in one night, for the dead. And it is not only Poland.

The same night, with the same lamps, is kept across the whole of that part of Europe where the western church went, in Lithuania, in the Czech lands, in Slovakia, in Croatia, in Hungary, in Slovenia, in Austria, and in the western parts of Belarus and Ukraine that were Polish and Lithuanian for centuries, and in every one of those places the burial grounds are lit and the families walk through them. The farmhouse candle went a long way when it went outside. The lamps are particular. Small glass jars with a candle inside, sold by the box, coloured red and gold and green, made to burn for a day or two in the wind. They are set on the grave in rows, or in a pattern, or in a heap.

Families compete a little, without saying so. A grave with one lamp on it is a grave whose family has moved away or died out, and people notice, and sometimes a stranger puts a lamp on it, for the same reason a stranger was once given the food from the empty plate. Flowers, in enormous quantity. The chrysanthemum, above all, which in that country is so completely the flower of the dead that you would not give one to a living person. Whole markets of them at the cemetery gates, in pots, in bunches, in every colour they come in.

And the people. This is what I most want you to see. Grandparents, parents, children, standing together at the grave of the great grandparents, in the dark, in the cold, with the lamp light on their faces. Talking. Not praying, mostly, though some do.

Talking. About the year. About who is missing. About the grandmother, and what she would have said. Children being told who is in the ground and how they are related to them.

Old people being helped along the path from one grave to the next, because the family has graves in three parts of the cemetery and all of them must be visited. I have described this scene before. I described it two nights ago, in the spring, in the eastern lands, with a cloth on the grave and eggs and the sweet grain. Take away the food and add ten thousand lamps and it is the same scene. The same walk.

The same standing. The same talking to the ground. The same children being taught who they belong to. Set our farmhouse candle beside the grave lamps. That is a comparison, not a proved line of descent.

One light, in the house I have pictured, is for guests expected home. The others mark graves visited by the living, and then it multiplied, and now there are a hundred thousand of them on one hill in one city, and you can see them from the road, and the priest, if he is there, is standing among them like everyone else. There is a thing that happens at these cemeteries that I want to give you because it is the exact point where two nights of this season touch. At the gate, in the crowds, among the flower sellers and the lamp sellers, there are people asking for money. Old people, mostly.

Some sing. Some simply hold out a hand. And people give, and have always given, on this night especially, and nobody thinks about why. The beggars are at the gate. They have been at the gate since before there was a church at the top of the hill.

They are the grandfathers, in the only form the grandfathers can take in the land of the living, and the lamps are lit for them too.

Now the poet, because it is time, and because without him this night would be a footnote in a book about church history, and with him it is something a whole nation carries around in its chest. He was born in the last week of the year seventeen ninety eight, in a small town in the countryside of what is now Belarus, which was then a corner of the old Lithuanian lands, which had until three years before been part of a large and strange and ancient state that had just been wiped off the map by its neighbours. He was born, in other words, into a country that no longer existed, among people who still knew what it had been, and that is the first thing to understand about everything he wrote. His name was Adam Mickiewicz. I am going to use his name tonight because he has been dead for a hundred and seventy years and because it is on every street in Poland, and there is no dignity in pretending you do not know it.

The town he grew up in was small, mixed, and old. Polish speaking gentry, Belarusian speaking farmers, a large Jewish population, Tatars descended from soldiers settled there centuries before, and a countryside all around it where the grandfathers were fed every autumn in exactly the way you heard two nights ago. He grew up inside that custom. Not observing it from a carriage. Inside it.

His family were minor gentry, poor enough to be close to the farm, and the farm did what farms did. His father was a lawyer of small means who died when the boy was thirteen. His mother came from a family that had once been something and was no longer. He was taught first by monks in the town, and then, at sixteen, on a scholarship that obliged him to become a schoolteacher afterward, he went to the university in the old capital of the region, which was then the best university in that part of Europe and which the empire that now ruled the region was about to close. He was brilliant, poor, and political in the way that clever young men in occupied countries are political, which is to say that he joined a secret society whose activities consisted mostly of reading poems to each other and talking about virtue.

The empire took it more seriously than they did. In the year eighteen twenty three the society was uncovered, and he was arrested, and held for months in a monastery that had been turned into a prison, and in the following year he was sent east, into the empire's interior, where he would spend five years in a kind of comfortable exile, moving between its great cities, never allowed to go home. The exile was strange, and I want to give you its shape, because it made him. He was not sent to a camp. He was sent to the capital, and then to the south, to the port on the Black Sea, and then to the old capital in the interior, and in each of them he was received, because he was already known as a poet, and in each of them he made friends, and the friends were the empire's own poets and thinkers, including the greatest of them, who admired him and whom he admired back, and who would within a few years be writing verse against everything he stood for.

He spent five years being fed and admired by the people whose empire had taken his country. It gave him a view of that empire from the inside that no one else in his position ever had, and when he came to write about it, he wrote about it as a man who had sat at its tables. He left in the year eighteen twenty nine, with permission, for the west, and never returned, and within a few years his country had risen and been crushed, and the door behind him was shut for good. He never did go home. That is the second thing to understand.

From the age of twenty five until his death at fifty six, in a city on the Bosphorus, of cholera, in the middle of a war, he lived in Russia, then in Germany, then in Paris, then briefly in Switzerland, then in Paris again, and he never once set foot again in the country he had been born in, which in any case no longer existed. But before the arrest, before the exile, when he was barely past twenty and had left the university to teach in a provincial school, and was writing at night, he wrote the play. It is called Dziady. The same word. The grandfathers, the beggars, the night.

He took the name of the farmhouse custom and put it on the title page of a play, and the play is about the custom, and it opens in the custom, and that is the reason tonight exists. I want to give you what he himself said about it, because he wrote a short note to go with the play explaining what Dziady was, for readers who might not know, and it is the earliest written description of the feeding of the dead by somebody who had grown up inside it. He says it is a ceremony for the dead, kept by the common people in many districts of the old Lithuanian lands and beyond, and that it has its origin in pagan times, and that the church has tried to stamp it out, and has not managed it, and that the people now keep it in secret, in chapels or in empty houses near the burial grounds, at night. He says a feast of foods and drinks and fruit is set out, and the souls of the dead are called, and the people believe that food and drink and song bring relief to the souls in their place of waiting. He says, in passing, that the church's own souls' day falls at about the same time as the rite, which is the whole of tonight in one clause from the man who was there.

And he says, and this is the sentence I keep, that the pious purpose of the feast, the lonely places, the night hour and the strange rites had once spoken strongly to his imagination, and that inside all the wild inventions of the village he could see a moral tendency and certain lessons, put in a way that plain people could feel. Spoke strongly to his imagination. A schoolteacher of twenty three, in a provincial town in an occupied country, in eighteen twenty two, who has been to the table, and has watched the calling, and cannot get it out of his head. What he made of it is the next three chapters, and I will tell you now that it is not a description. He did not write down the custom, though he claims the songs and spells in it are taken largely, and here and there word for word, from the village's own.

He wrote a play in which the custom is the door, and through the door come three kinds of ghost, and each one is carrying a lesson, and the lessons are his, not the farmhouse's, and they are among the most quoted lines in his language, and children learn them at school, and they are, as we will see, very strange things for a national poem to say.

The play has several parts and they were written years apart and out of order, and only one of them is set in the custom, and it is the one he wrote first, and it is the one tonight is about. He numbered it Part Two. I will not explain the numbering, because he never quite did either. It is short. Less than an hour on a stage.

It is written in verse, and a great deal of it is spoken or answered by a chorus, and it takes place in one room on one night, and the room is a chapel. Not a church. A chapel. Small, old, wooden, standing at the edge of a burial ground on the edge of a village, the kind of building that has a bell but no priest, and that is locked most of the year. It is night.

It is the night of the grandfathers. And the villagers have come to the chapel in secret, after dark, and locked the door behind them, and covered the windows, and put out every light, and set out food. That is where the play begins, and I want you to notice, before a single word of verse is spoken, what he has done with the custom. He has moved it. Two nights ago the table was in the house, at the family's own hearth, with the door on the latch and the candle in the window for the world to see.

Here it is in a chapel, in secret, with the windows covered. He has taken a domestic, open, unhidden thing and made it clandestine. That is partly what he saw, or what he was told, in districts where the church had leaned harder on the custom than in others. And it is partly what a young poet in an occupied country needs a ceremony to be, which is secret, and dangerous, and a little bit like a resistance. One more thing from his note, because it is odd and because it is his.

He says that in ancient times, before the church, the ceremony had another name, and that it was called the feast of the goat, and that a man presided at it who was at once a priest and a poet. Where he got that is still argued over. It may be something he heard. It may be something he half heard and improved. I give it to you because it belongs to his account of the custom's past, rather than simply to his description of the people in the chapel.

Even a writer who grew up inside a custom can mix what people do with what he believes they once did. And he has changed who leads it. At the farmhouse, the head of the household called the names. In the chapel there is a man he calls, in a word I will translate as the wizard, or the sorcerer, or the conjurer, and none of those is right, because the word in the village meant a worker of spells, and the poet's own note ties it to a man who plays the old stringed instrument and speaks over it, and the nearest thing in English is something between a village wise man and a spirit medium and a cantor. He leads the ceremony.

He calls. He commands. He knows the words. And the villagers answer him in chorus. The first thing they say, all together, in the dark, is the line that every schoolchild in that country can still say for you.

It is very simple. Dark everywhere, quiet everywhere. What is going to happen. What is going to happen. Then the calling begins, and it follows the shape you already know, and it is done, in the play, in three movements, because the poet has sorted the dead into three kinds, and calls each kind separately, and each kind answers.

Before the first calling, the wizard tells the villagers to close the door and put out every lamp and candle and to say nothing unless he tells them to, and then he tells them why they are here. And what he tells them is the theology of the farmhouse, said out loud in verse, and it is worth having. The souls of the dead, he says, are in a place of suffering or of waiting, and they can be helped, and the way they can be helped is with food and with prayer, and tonight is the night they are allowed to come and ask for it. That is the church's doctrine and the farmhouse's practice in one speech, and he does not seem to notice they were ever separate. Then he lights a handful of something, and calls, and the first ghosts come.

I am going to give them to you one kind at a time, and I am going to tell you what each one asks for, and what each one is refused, because the whole meaning of the play is in the refusals. But first the room, once more, because I want you to be in it. A small wooden chapel with the windows covered. Every light out. Thirty villagers standing in the dark with their backs against the walls.

In the middle, not a table but a coffin, with the villagers told to stand round it and the food they have brought set down beside it. And the door locked. And outside, the burial ground, and the graves, and the cold. Everything you have heard for two nights, put on a stage, in the dark, with the door shut.

The first ghosts to come are the smallest, and the play is at its most gentle here, and I would like you to hear it gently. The wizard lights a handful of flax, the one flame in the room, and calls for the light souls, the ones who have no weight, the ones who have nothing to be forgiven. And two children come. A boy and a girl, small, holding hands, floating, if the stage can manage it, up under the roof of the chapel. They died young, before they could do anything wrong, and they have been in a kind of paradise ever since, and they are miserable.

That is the first surprise, and it is the whole of the poet's method. They are miserable in paradise. They explain why. They have never known anything but sweetness, and so sweetness means nothing to them, and heaven is closed to them, not as a punishment, but because they are not ready for it. They ask for one thing.

Two grains of mustard seed, the smallest bitter thing there is, so that they can taste bitterness once and be let in. And the chorus says the line. The line that is carved over the whole play. Whoever has never once tasted bitterness will never taste sweetness in heaven. The villagers give them the seed.

The children take it. They go. Think about what a young man has just said, in an occupied country, in a play about feeding the dead. He has said that innocence is not enough. That a life with no suffering in it is a life that has not started.

That the two children who never did anything wrong are further from heaven than the villagers standing in the dark with their sins on them. It is a strange thing to say, and it is said kindly, and it has been said in that language ever since. The second calling is not gentle, and I will keep it short, because the play keeps it short and because this is a night for sleeping. The wizard calls the heavy souls, the ones with weight on them, and one comes, and it is the ghost of the landowner. The master of the village.

The man who owned the villagers standing in the room, or their fathers, and who in life did what such men did, which is to say that he let a woman and her child die in the snow rather than feed them, and ordered a hungry man beaten after he had taken a few apples from the orchard. The gardener had chased him with dogs. Before the master, hunger became a crime for which he was made an example. He arrives surrounded by birds. Owls, ravens, night birds, a whole cloud of them, tearing at him.

And the birds are the people he wronged. He is starving, and every time food is brought toward him the birds take it before it reaches his mouth. He asks the villagers for water, for a crumb, for anything, and they cannot give it, and the wizard tells him why, and the line is the mirror of the first one. Whoever has never once been a human being cannot be helped by a human being. Nobody in the chapel can feed him.

He is sent away with nothing. And I want you to hear what has been done here, because it is the farmhouse custom turned into a weapon. Two nights ago the unquiet dead were fed on the threshold and told to go in peace. Here, the poet has put the village's landlord among the unquiet dead and let the village refuse him. Read it as one imagined revenge against a cruel master, and it is taken in a play, and it was read aloud in that country for a century by people who had lived under men exactly like him.

The third calling is the one people remember, and it is neither light nor heavy, and it is about a girl. Her name is Zosia. She was the prettiest girl in the village and she died at nineteen, and in life she had been loved by every boy in the district and had loved none of them back. Not cruelly. She had simply never touched the ground.

She danced, she laughed, she was admired, she went through her short life like something blown along a road, and she died, and now she is neither in heaven nor out of it, floating a little above the earth, with the wind moving her, and she cannot come down and she cannot go up. She asks the villagers for one thing. That the boys pull her down to earth, just for a moment, so that she can feel it. And the wizard tells her she must wait two more years, and then she may be let in, and the line is the third of the three. Whoever has never once touched the earth can never be in heaven.

Then the play does one more thing, quickly, at the end, and it is the thing that makes it a play and not a sermon. The wizard calls the last of the dead, whoever is left, whoever has not come, and sends them all home in the words of the dismissal, and orders the door opened. And one ghost does not go. A young man, silent, pale, with a wound on his chest, who walks straight to a young woman in the chorus, a shepherdess in mourning, and stands in front of her and will not speak and will not leave. The wizard commands him, and commands him again, and sprinkles him with holy water.

He does not move. The wizard asks for the stole and a blessed candle, lights it and makes one more attempt. The ghost still does not vanish. Then the wizard has the shepherdess taken outside. The ghost moves.

He follows her, and where the villagers lead her, he goes after her. The play ends with that movement, with the villagers asking again what is going to happen, and with the words of the dismissal having failed. That ghost is the poet. Or somebody very like him. The rest of the play, the parts written later, are about who he is, and I am not going to follow him there, because he leaves the chapel and the chapel is what tonight is about.

What matters is that the custom, in the poet's hands, ends with a ghost whom the ritual cannot send away. Two nights ago the woman at the table said go home and they went. In the play, one of them remains with the living, following the woman out.

I have given you the three lines, one for each kind of ghost, and I want to sit with them for a chapter, because they are the reason the play survived, and they are very strange. Whoever has never once tasted bitterness will never taste sweetness in heaven. Whoever has never once been a human being cannot be helped by a human being. Whoever has never once touched the earth can never be in heaven. Put those three together and you have a complete moral world, and it is not the church's, and it is not the farmhouse's either.

It is the poet's, and he was not yet twenty five. Here is what the three lines say, plainly. That suffering is not a punishment but a requirement. That being human, which in the play means being kind to another human when it costs you, is the only thing that makes help possible, so that a man who was never kind cannot be reached, even by the people who want to reach him. And that the earth is not something to escape from but something you have to have touched, really touched, in love or in labour or in grief, before you are allowed to leave it.

They are still said. That is the measure of them. Not in theatres. In kitchens. Say the first half of the first one, whoever has never tasted bitterness, to almost anyone raised in that country, and they will finish it for you, because they learned it as a child.

The second gets reached for when a hard man is being described. The third is the kind of line that gets said quietly. Three lines from a village feast for the dead, written by a schoolteacher in his twenties, have become the proverbs of a nation, and most of the people who say them could not tell you which ghost said which. And notice the shape of the play against the shape of the farmhouse. Two nights ago the family gave what it could and said to the ones who came without being called, forgive us, we have given you what we could.

In the chapel, the villagers give what they can, the seed and the water and the promise of two years, and to the one they cannot help they say, plainly, that they cannot. The refusal in the play is the same refusal as the forgiveness at the farmhouse door, seen from the other side. Both of them are a family saying to its dead: this is the limit of what we can do for you, and we are sorry, and we have done it. None of that is doctrine. The church of his childhood did not teach that innocent children are kept out of heaven for lack of suffering.

It taught that they went straight in. He knew that. He wrote the opposite, and he put it in the mouths of villagers at a feast for the dead, and he made it rhyme, and it became the thing every person in his country could recite. Why did it survive? I think for two reasons, and I offer them as a reading.

The first is that it is true to the custom in a way he might not have intended. Two nights ago I told you that the feeding of the dead was, at bottom, a claim about the size of a family. The poet's three lines are a claim about what it takes to belong to one. You have to have suffered, so that you know what the others are suffering. You have to have been kind, so that you can be helped.

You have to have touched the earth, so that you have somewhere to be from. A family the size of a village, with the dead in it, held together by those three things. That is what the villagers in the chapel are, and it is what the farmhouse was, and he saw it. The second reason is history, and it is darker. Within a decade of writing those lines he was in exile and his country had risen against its occupier and been crushed.

Within two decades the play had become the book that people in that country read when they wanted to know who they were. And a country that is being crushed, and that reads, every winter, a play in which suffering is the price of heaven and the landlord is refused at the table, is a country that has found a way to say something it could not say in any other form. Whoever has never once tasted bitterness. Everyone in that country had tasted it. The line told them it counted for something.

I will give you one more thing about the play and then we will follow it out of the chapel, because it has a long way to go. In the whole of Part Two, the part in the chapel, the word God appears, and the church appears, and prayer appears, and there is no priest. Not one. The ceremony is led by the wizard, the villagers answer in chorus, the dead come and go, and the church is a building on the edge of the burial ground with its windows covered, being used for something the church had spent eight hundred years trying to stop. He grew up walking past that priest on the road.

He put the priest's church in the play and left the priest out of it. That is a young man's revenge, and it is also, in its way, exactly accurate. On that night, in that house, the priest was never in the room.

Now the play leaves the chapel, and it goes a very long way, and I am going to walk it there quickly, because the whole journey is the answer to a question you may have been asking since the start of tonight, which is how a short verse play about a village feast became the most important book a nation has. The chapel part was published in the year eighteen twenty three, in the old capital of his region, in a small volume with some other poems, a few months before he was arrested. It did not make him famous. It made him known, among the young and the literate and the political, which in that place and time was a small circle that talked to itself constantly. He was exiled the following year, and the play went with him, in his head, unfinished.

Nine years later he finished the next part of it, and it was not about a chapel. In the winter of eighteen thirty and thirty one, the part of his country that was under the empire's rule rose against the empire, and fought for most of a year, and lost, and the losing was total. Thousands went into exile, across Germany, into France, the officers and the writers and the politicians of a defeated country, and the poet, who had not been there for the rising, who had been in Rome, and who never forgave himself for it, went with them, and in the spring of eighteen thirty two, in Dresden, in a few weeks, in what people who knew him described as something close to a fever, he wrote the third part of the play. It is not set in a chapel. It is set in a prison, in the old capital, in the monastery where he himself had been held, and it is about young men arrested for belonging to a secret society, and about the empire that arrested them, and about God, and it contains a speech, given by the prisoner who stands for the poet, in which a man alone in a cell in the middle of the night demands that God explain himself, and threatens him, and is answered by silence, and it is the most famous piece of verse in that language, and it is called the Great Improvisation, and I am not going to give it to you, because it is not a sleeping story and because it belongs to the prison part of this play and not to the farmhouse.

What I will tell you is that he called that part of the play by the same name. Dziady. The grandfathers. A prison, an empire, a man shouting at God, and he put the name of the feast for the dead on it, because in his mind it was all one thing: the dead of the country, called by name, on a night when they are allowed to come. There is one more part of the play, and I have to mention it because it is the ghost at the end of the chapel.

In the same year as the chapel, eighteen twenty three, he published a fourth part, set in a priest's house on the night of the grandfathers, in which a young man arrives at the door, half mad, and talks for three hours, to the priest and to a candle, about a woman who married another man, and then reveals himself to be dead, and goes. He is, in a common reading of the play, the silent ghost from the end of Part Two, given a voice and a grievance and three hours to air it. It is a deeply private part of the poet's work and it is about his own broken heart, and he set it on the night of the dead because that was the night when a person like that could come to the door and be let in. So the three parts he finished are a chapel, a priest's house, and a prison, and the prison part also reaches Christmas Eve, and all three are called by the same name, and in all three the dead come and ask for something. That is not a play with a frame.

That is a man who could not stop going back to the table. From Dresden he went to Paris, and he lived there, mostly, for the rest of his life, teaching, writing, quarrelling, falling under the influence of a mystic he should have avoided, and never going home. The play, in all its parts, was printed in Paris and smuggled east. It was banned in the parts of his country the empire held. It was read anyway.

It was copied by hand. A generation grew up in occupied towns learning it from their parents the way villagers had once learned the calling, by mouth, in private, by candlelight, and the poet who had made the farmhouse custom into a play had, without meaning to, made his play into a farmhouse custom. He died in the year eighteen fifty five, in Constantinople, of cholera, having gone there to raise a regiment for a war he thought might free his country and did not. His body was taken to Paris, and then, thirty five years later, to the old royal cathedral in the south of the country he had never been allowed to return to, and it lies there now, with the kings. And he never saw the play on a stage.

That is the last thing to say before we get to the theatre, and it is the strangest. He wrote a play, in verse, in parts, with a chorus and ghosts and a prison and a speech to God, and he died without seeing a minute of it performed. One fragment of the prison part was put on in the old southern city in eighteen forty eight, while he was far away in the west, and that is all there was in his lifetime, because in the country it was about it was banned and in the countries where he lived nobody spoke the language. The first full staging was in the year nineteen hundred and one, in the old southern city where his body lies, forty six years after his death, staged in the city theatre by a painter who was also a playwright, whose name was Wyspianski, and who cut the whole enormous sprawling text down to a single evening and put it on a stage, in the last days of October, on the night of the grandfathers or as near to it as the theatre could manage, and the play began a second life that has not ended, as the thing every serious theatre in that country must sooner or later attempt. Every generation since has had its production, and every production has been argued about, and the argument is always the same argument, which is how much of the chapel to keep and how much of the prison, and whether the wizard is a peasant or a priest or something older than either, and whether the ghosts are real.

The painter kept the chapel. The great directors of the middle of the last century kept the prison. And the one that matters most for tonight kept both, and put them on in Warsaw, in the winter, at exactly the wrong moment, and that is the next chapter. That is how a village feast became a country. A boy grew up inside the custom, put it in a play, was exiled, put his exile in the same play, died, and left behind a text that his people used, for a hundred years, in place of the country they did not have.

When they finally had one, the play was already waiting on its stages, and has never left them.

I am going to tell you about one production, and I am going to tell it plainly and briefly, because it is recent, and because what followed it was serious, and because the play itself is what this night is about and not the politics that have grown around it. In the autumn of nineteen sixty seven, the national theatre in Warsaw put on the play. This was not remarkable. Every generation put on the play. The director was a serious man with a long career, and the production was, by every account, a serious production, and it opened in late November of that year.

It had been put on, in fact, to mark an anniversary of the revolution in the east, which is the kind of thing that was done in that country in those years, and which nobody involved seems to have thought through, because the play, staged straight, is a play about young men in a prison and an empire that put them there, and the empire in the play is the same empire whose revolution was being celebrated. The audiences understood this at once. That is the whole of what happened next. Not that the director had changed a line, because he had not. Not that the actors had winked.

That the audience, night after night, applauded in the wrong places. When the prisoner spoke against the empire, they applauded. When the play said that the country would rise, they applauded. They applauded lines that had been in the play for a hundred and thirty years, because those lines said, in verse, in a national theatre, what could not be said in a newspaper. The government noticed, because governments of that kind notice applause.

The embassy of the country to the east noticed, and said so. And in the middle of January it was announced that the production would close, and the closing night was fixed for the thirtieth. The director had known it was coming. Before Christmas he had been called in and told to his face what his production was: anti Russian, anti Soviet, and religious. Everything after that was only a matter of the date.

And on that last night, when the play ended, the audience did not go home. A large part of it, students mostly, walked out of the theatre and through the city to the monument of the poet, which stands on the old royal road, just outside the old town, and laid flowers, and made speeches, and chanted a line that asked for independence without censorship, and were, about thirty five of them, taken away by the police. That was the beginning. Over the next six weeks the arrests spread, and the students of the university protested the arrests, and the protests spread to other cities, and the government answered the protests with force, and then with a campaign that turned, very quickly and very deliberately, against a particular group of its own citizens, and by the end of that year thousands of people had been driven out of the country, most of them Jewish, most of them with nothing, and the whole episode has a name in that country's history that is simply the name of the month it happened in, and it is not a name that is said lightly. I have told you that plainly and I am going to stop there, because the rest is a story about the present, and I do not tell those.

What I want you to keep is only this. A play about a village feeding its dead, in a chapel, with the windows covered, was closed by a government in the middle of the twentieth century because the government was afraid of what people would hear in it, and the people walked from the theatre to the poet's statue with flowers, and the statue is still there, and the play is still staged, and every serious production since has had to decide what to do about that night, and most of them do not have to decide anything, because everyone in the audience already knows. The villagers in the chapel say, all together, in the dark: dark everywhere, quiet everywhere, what is going to happen. In the winter of nineteen sixty eight a theatre full of people said it back to him and then went out into the dark and found out.

Back to the road, because we started with a priest walking on it, and it is time to walk home. It is the second of November. Late. The priest has read the names, and the church is dark, and he is walking back along the road that goes past the farmhouse, and past the burial ground, and past the chapel at its edge, which is locked, and has been locked for a hundred years, and has no wizard in it and never did, except in a book. To his left, up the slope, the burial ground is lit.

Not the way it was two nights ago, with one cloth and one plate and one family sitting on the grass. Lit. Hundreds of small red and gold flames in glass, on every grave, in rows, guttering in the wind that comes across the fields, so that the whole hillside moves and flickers like a low fire that will not catch. There are still people up there, a few, standing in their coats. He can see the shapes of them against the light.

He does not go up. He was up there this afternoon, with the whole parish, and he blessed the graves, and he will go up again tomorrow to see that the lamps are out. To his right, down the lane, the farmhouse. And in its window, as there was two nights ago and every year of his life, one candle. Not a glass lamp.

A candle, tallow or wax, in a plain holder, set where it is not usually set, burning for somebody who is expected. Two candles. One on the hill, in a hundred glasses, put there by the living so that the living can find the dead. One in the window, in a single holder, put there so that the dead can find the living. The church's candle and the farmhouse's candle, forty yards apart on a cold night at the start of November, and the same family lit both.

He stops on the road, between them. I do not know what he thinks. I have made him up, out of a thousand real priests in a thousand real parishes, and I am not going to put a thought in his head that he did not have. But I can tell you what he sees, because it is what anyone would see who stood there, and it is the end of this night. He sees that nobody won.

The church came with its days and its names and its list read from the pulpit and its bread at the porch and its candle on the grave, and it brought all of that to the table, and the table took it, and set it beside the sweet wheat, and went on. The poet came with his chapel and his wizard and his three kinds of ghost and his lines that every child can say, and he put the table on a stage, and the stage became a country, and the country closed the theatre, and the theatre reopened, and through all of it the woman in the farmhouse went on turning the spoon down. The state came, in the end, with its police and its winter, and closed a door, and the people walked to a statue with flowers, and the door opened again. And the candle in the window did not go out for any of it. That is the thing I said I would come back to.

Whether any of what happened to the custom changed the custom. And the answer, standing on that road, is that the custom has been given a name by the church and a play by a poet and a crisis by a state, and it has taken all three, and it is still one plate, one spoon, one candle, and one name said out loud to an empty chair. The whole of tonight is what the world did to that. And that is what it did to the world. It let it in, and fed it, and sent it home.

And in the morning, in the farmhouse we have pictured, the woman will wait for the light and follow the order of our scene, and the plate will go out on the step for whoever comes, and there will be, this year as every year, somebody coming, an old man in a bad coat on his way up to the hill where the lamps are going out one by one in the wind, who will take the bread, and say a word or two for the dead of the house, by name if she tells him, and go on. The priest walks on. The lamps on the hill will burn until morning. The candle in the window will burn until the grey comes and the woman says the words and opens the door. Somewhere in a city three hundred miles away a theatre is dark, and on its stage there is a coffin with food set beside it and a locked door, and tomorrow night thirty actors will stand against the walls in the dark and say, all together, dark everywhere, quiet everywhere, and the audience will know what is going to happen, because it has been happening for a thousand years, and it happened tonight, and it will happen next year, when they are called.

Goodnight.