Darkness

Darkness — this is not a word for the surface of a thing. It is the place just short of where the light finally sinks away. It is the deep that opens beyond.

What I keep searching for is a quiet world, free of noise. Perhaps that is the reason I make things at all — to come a little closer to it. In the gloss of ebonite, in layer upon layer built up over time, in the shadows that sleep deep inside a material: look closely into any of them and the same depth is there. Whatever the finish, the place it arrives at does not change. That is why this one pen is given a single name across every material: Darkness.

In deep darkness, the ears and the fingertips begin to work before the eyes do. It is because you cannot see that you find yourself following the faint presence of things, gently. Perhaps the heart is the same. The further you go down into the quiet, the more a voice that had been lost in the busyness begins, little by little, to regain its outline.

The words you most want to say are always somewhere deep. Even if you cannot scoop them up at once, they go on being there. There is no need to hurry — you can simply reach out, quietly. If the time you spend with Darkness can be what begins that descent, I would be glad.

"In the place closest to your silence." The depth that lies nearest to that stillness is what we call Darkness.