Full Constant Light

In “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” John Donne affirms that “Love is a growing, or full constant light, / And his first minute, after noon, is night.” I think that’s true. In the main. There are moments when a quarrel shades the light, and moments when the quarrel, turned to outright battle, quenches it entirely. For a minute or an hour, perhaps. Quarrels aren’t the same thing as jealousy, however. When jealousy has substance to invigorate it, then love has entered its post meridian phase and gone to full night.

 

That’s what happens to Othello. As he says to Iago,

 

Think'st thou I'ld make a lie of jealousy,

To follow still the changes of the moon

With fresh suspicions? No; to be once in doubt

Is once to be resolved: exchange me for a goat,

When I shall turn the business of my soul

To such exsufflicate and blown surmises. . . .

 

Othello mistakes doubt for certainty and immediately implements the shift to resolution, full midnight. People who encounter Othello’s rage blame him for not taking what should be the intermediate step, verification of the doubt. Donne may explain one aspect of Othello’s change—that one minute after noon destroys him.

 

Still, I do want to give Othello a break. He does verify, in some sense, via the “witness” of Iago himself. Recall that Othello comes to the habits and mores of Venetian social interaction from the “tented field,” the field of battle, where he has lived ever since he was seven years old. He has lived in Venice for only “nine moons,” a phrase that suggests that in the intricacies of Venice, Othello is a new-born baby. He knows very little, almost nothing about how Venice comports itself. And what he does know about women he has learned on that same “tented field,” where camp followers were no doubt legion. Those are the women, primarily women, that the Union army during the US Civil War called hookers after General Joseph Hooker.

 

When Iago tells Othello that “In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience / Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown,” Othello responds, “Dost say so?” He concedes even before Iago pours the full dose of poison into his ear. Sure, Othello then demands “ocular proof” of what Iago has told him, but the substance that invigorates his jealousy is the auditory “proof” that Iago, an old hand at Venetian mores after all, has given him.

 

Doubt about the fidelity of one’s partner in life is to me an imponderable phenomenon. I have never doubted my wife. I can’t conceive of any betrayal that would warrant any such doubt. It’s not that it would be impossible for a partner to find someone else so attractive that she or he would transgress that minute before noon and convert all love to night. But it would be impossible for my wife, I think, as it would for me. In our case the appropriate passage is not from Othello but from Hamlet, in the letter from Hamlet to Ophelia that begins with that “vile phrase; ‘beautified’”:

 

Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt I love.

 

I should not and so shall not speak for my wife, although I know that she is more trustable than the “fire” of the stars, which Arthur Eddington would later prove not fire, or the movement of the sun, which Copernicus had already proven wrong. But I will speak for myself. I could never betray the forty-six years of marriage that have entangled her in me so profoundly that were I to sever the tangle I’d cease to exist.

For me there can be no minute after noon.