Abstract

When the brother of the poet Anne Carson died she wrote an elegy for him “in the form of an epitaph.” Her 2010 work Nox is a beguiling and beautiful work, as difficult to characterize as the brother it seeks to commemorate. This article explores the sensory experience of reading Nox, a text, which appeals to an elusive awareness at the edge of memory and imagination. In describing her brother, Carson evokes “a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.” The aim of this paper is to show how this opacity emerges in the encounter with this captivating work, to pursue what it means to let “night” appear.