“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”

December 7, 1995, p. 272
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Part II, line 115–124
Pleasures of Hope (1799)
Context: Let Winter come! let polar spirits sweep
The darkening world, and tempest-troubled deep!
Though boundless snows the withered heath deform,
And the dim sun scarce wanders through the storm,
Yet shall the smile of social love repay,
With mental light, the melancholy day!
And, when its short and sullen noon is o'er,
The ice-chained waters slumbering on the shore,
How bright the fagots in his little hall
Blaze on the hearth, and warm the pictured wall!

Source: 1840s, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Ch. 10

1960's

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/robert-pirsig-dead-wrote-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance.html

Variant: Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.
Source: Carmilla

Source: The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913), The Crowning Hour, II
Context: p>If this is a dream, then perhaps our dreaming
Can touch life's height to a finer fire:
Who knows but the heavens and all their seeming
Were made by the heart's desire?One thing shines clear in the heart's sweet reason,
One lightning over the chasm runs —
That to turn from love is the world's one treason
That darkens all the suns.</p

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.4 "The Impact of the Mongol Empire on Shifting Disease Balances, 1200-1500".

As quoted at a Broadway memorial tribute to Saroyan, reported in The New York Times (31 October 1983)