In 1943, Hannah Arendt published an article entitled “We Refugees” in a Jewish-oriented New York magazine, Menorah Journal. Here she observes that her fellow exiles act like optimists in public, for they want to banish their terrors and assimilate to an optimistic American society. The exceptions are the ones who can’t maintain the appearance and “turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way.”

She says, “I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.”

Around the same time, she privately wrote a poem in her native tongue that I will translate–a little loosely–as follows:

Sadness is like a light that is lit in the heart,
Darkness, a glow that gives shape to our night.
We set the small lamp of sorrow alight
To find our way home through the night's darkest part.
It brightens the wood, city, street, and tree.
And one who has no home--blessed is he;
In his dreams, even so, he sees home right.

At first, I didn’t love “darkness is like a light” (Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein), because that just seems to be a contradiction. But I came to appreciate the idea that the darkness of a sad night brings a kind of illumination by revealing the past.

The original German is three rhymed couplets:

Die Traurigkeit ist wie ein Licht im Herzen angezündet, 
Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein, der unsere Nacht ergründet. 
Wir brauchen nur das kleine Licht der Trauer zu entzünden, 
Um durch die lange weite Nacht wie Schatten heimzufinden. 
Beleuchtet ist der Wald, die Stadt, die Strasse und der Baum. 
Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat; er sieht sie noch im Traum.

See also: “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt; Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot; phenomenology of nostalgia