Boban Knežević
The Valley of Unlit Candles
In a movie, the name and content of which I cannot recall, at one moment a large room in which tens of thousands of unlit candles are burning appears. Such a setting has been used before and after, I have seen it in various places, but in this movie, the title of which I cannot recall, the number of candles was literally fascinating: a hall ten paces wide and at least twenty paces long, it’s difficult to tell precisely, but the people in it seemed tiny, the walls twice the height of a man, covered in candles from floor to ceiling… one hundred and fifty, perhaps all of two hundred square meters filled with burning candles. The candles were thin, small, strung close together, not more than a palm’s width apart… and thus for the entire circumference of the room and the entire height of the walls. The candles were placed along the walls on a simple array of wooden shelves, quite narrow and quite thin, as though they had sprouted from the walls specially for this occasion… twenty thousand candles at least, all lit, all ablaze, all upright, while tens of thousands of droplets of wax trickle down them… Now, the thing bothering me in all of this, and here I’ve been all night, thinking it over, is one thing only: how were all those candles lit?
I have never thought about this before, I admit: why on earth would I think about something like that, but now, at this moment so meaningful to me, this question seems not only crucial, but solely relevant.
Let’s assume that three to five seconds are needed to light a candle… the wick is frequently bent and joined to the wax, so several moments are needed for the fire to dry and catch it… let’s take four seconds as average. Therefore, in order for one man to light twenty thousand candles he must spend at least eighty thousand seconds, which is almost one whole day. Let’s overlook the fact that noone can do any kind of job incessantly for twenty-two hours, not even such a simple one as lighting candles. Twenty-two hours, then. And the candles, those small candles that were used, quite certainly burn up within one hour, perhaps even in half that time. So it turns out that our hapless candlelighter would be faced with the first lit candles burning up after only a twentieth part of the job was done…
Therefore, it’s quite certain that one man could not accomplish such a task in any timeframe, under any circumstances. Not even ten men… nor twenty… fifty perhaps. But, let’s see what that would be like. Fifty men would, assuming that they work evenly, perform this task in somewhat less than half an hour… none of the candles would have burnt up although many would be close. Theoretically, it’s possible, but practically? The walls are truly twice the height of a man and though each of the participants gets merely the width of one man, they have this extreme height to deal with. Impossible without a ladder, without fantastic organization of everything also impossible.
Take a look at all that is needed to light a candle at the height of four meters… how about a thousand…If each of the fifty lighters flew, it might even be possible, but this way, I doubt it. Imagine one mistake, one fall, which then causes others… shelves tumble, candles fall, the organizers in an outrage…
The longer I think about it, the more insoluble this problem seems… but I saw it in a movie, the name of which I cannot recall, I clearly saw tens of thousands of candles burning, some fallen, some broken, real candles with real, uneven flames upon them. It might be imagined that the creators of the movie made twenty thousand artificial candles that seemed real, but I doubt that. Or else Americans, somehow I know that the movie is American although I can recall nothing else about it, have come up with some ingenious trick to achieve all of this. If we add to this the battle scene that lasts a good ten minutes, and was filmed perhaps for hours, for half an hour at least, the problem of the candles that are 1) lit 2) lit simultaneously, is no longer within the frame of anything remotely realistic and borders the other side…Perhaps some magic ritual can cause all of the candles to ignite at the same time… If we were to previously clean each wick and then coat it with gasoline or some similar highly flammable substance, and then use a small flamethrower to lightly touch the tips of the candles…
Perhaps Americans have invented a matter that is self-igniting at, say, the temperature of thirty degrees. The room is cooled to twenty degrees, all wicks are coated with this matter, and then the room is heated and all the candles ignite…This actually seems like the most logical solution, even though I haven’t heard of anything similar existing… But, since I cannot verify any of my assumptions, I pay the same attention to the logical, the less logical, and the completely illogical solutions.
As dawn is approaching, I try to force myself to abandon this pondering upon tens of thousands of candles… Strangely, I am not sleepy, I just think for a moment about the absurdity of the situation I am in… I would never have believed that a man could spend the last night of his life in thoughts such as these…
The valley is covered with mist, and the starry sky is concealed by some kind of veil, probably it’s my sight that is dimming. I try to settle in a more comfortable position, but my shattered leg prevents any movement whatsoever… I peer out slightly from behind my shelter and listen to the approaching murmur of thousands of soldiers, for which I have been told are the enemy… If only I knew the name of this field I will leave my bones upon, the field I believed was holy land worth fighting for. Just a moment more and I will be able to see, them, some other volunteers that have been told this is holy land that must not be left to another…
I lie on a rock, I hear them coming, thousands of them, an uneven rubble, a multiplied me, entangled in the spider’s web of war and hatred… I wait to see the whites of their eyes… I’m as ready as I can be in such a state…I remind myself of a huddled worker of some movie company outside the door of a huge hall with twenty thousand candles, holding a box of matches and anticipating the opening of the door, the beginning of my minute in which I shall try to touch as many wicks as I can with my flame.