“Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.”
Job wishes for darkness and shadow to claim the night and for a cloud to settle upon the day, extending the curse into a cosmic wish for the obscuration of the time of his birth. The piling up of images of darkness and obscurity reveals the psychological reality of depression: the wish to extinguish the painful fact of existence through the erasure of its origin. The hyperbolic language of curse becomes the only adequate vehicle for expressing such comprehensive negation.
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