Many years ago, The Rolling Stones sang about painting the world black.  Everything, this song went, should be black:  it's all emptiness, it's all futile.  The world has collapsed, and nothing matters anymore.

     For some of us, this may well be true:  the future may look very bleak.  For others, however, darkness is an invitation to light, a harbinger of dawn.  The French painter Pierre Soulages, whose work is currently being celebrated at the Louvre in Paris, understands this well.  Noted for his long standing commitment (Soulages has been painting for over seventy years) to centering his painting on the color black, he states that the blackness of his paintings is not designed to repel, but rather to draw in, to encourage viewers to find themselves in it.  "It [this drawing in black] happens, between the surface of the painting and the person who is in front of it;" he says, "the reflection of light is what moves us."

     If black is the end of color, it is also the beginning:  color could not be without it.  As are our lives.  Had we not come out of the darkness of the womb, we would not be in this world of color, and had we not seen the darkness of existence, we would miss its light.  Apart from the dark emptiness of space, this world of color could not be.
     So did over a century ago Rudolph Otto observe that, when confronted with the fright of the unknown, transcendent, and divine, though we human beings cower, we are also in awe.  We know, know instinctively, that in the darkest and most mysterious darkness we will see the clearest and brightest light.
     In a therefore inherently meaningful universe, that is the only point.