Dewdney - Acquainted with the night: excursions through the world after dark

I have been one acquainted with the night I have walked out in rain-and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light.

ROBERT FROST

I LOVE NIGHT. SOME of my earliest memories are of magical summer evenings, the excitement I felt at nights arrival, its dark splendor. Later, when I was eleven, there were hot summer nights, especially if the moon was bright, when I felt irresistibly drawn outside. Id wait until my parents were asleep and then sneak out of the house, avoiding the creaky parts of the wooden stairs and the oak floors in the hallway. After quietly shutting the back door behind me, I was free, deliciously alone in the warm night air. A bolt of pure electric joy would rush through me as I stepped into the bright stillness of the moonlit yard.

We lived at the edge of a forest, so Id hop the rail fence and blend into the trees. Even without moonlight my night vision was good enough to avoid stepping on twigs and dry leaves. Imagining I was a puma or a leopard, Id walk silently through the forest, a creature free in the North American night. Although I didnt know it at the time, by exercising my night vision I was proving Victor Hugos maxim Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night. I was one with the darkness, the forest and the animals of the night.

In a sense I still am. My fascination with night has continued unabated. I have published poems about night and I still enjoy long night walks, though they pass through city neighborhoods instead of forests. Of course Im not the only one who is infatuated with night. Melissa, the seven-year-old daughter of a friend, told me (in confidence) that, on certain special nights-she called them wish nights-she goes outside and captures some of the twilight in a small wooden box her mother gave her. That way, she said, I can look inside the box during the day and see my magic night in there. I can only open the box just a little, though, otherwise all the dark will leak out. Her box reminded me of William Blakes Crystal Cabinet: And within it opens into a world / And a lovely little moony night. I dont expect everyone to love night as Melissa and I do, but we probably have all had at least one remarkable night, a night well always remember-that first evening date with the love of our lives, a summer night camping under the stars, perhaps a memorable night at the movies as a child. But it seems that darkness is especially sweet for new lovers. For them the evening is never long enough. As Thomas Moore wrote:

Fly not yet; t is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And maids who love the moon.

Deeply, intimately, we are shaped by night. It is part of us. The rhythms of our bodies, the ebb and flow of our moods, the very pulse of our minds, are vitally linked to the daily cycle of light and dark. For some, night may be a time of anxiety, of loneliness and apprehension; for others, it is a celebratory time of freedom from work, of sensual pleasures and entertainments. Night is when we can put the worries of the day behind, yet it is also a frontier in which we are blind, where unseen dangers lurk. We are creatures of the day, and night has historically been our adversary, an exception to the rule of light. But in the larger universe the reverse is true, night is the rule and light is the exception. Daylight is bracketed by darkness, and our sun floats within the immensity of an endless cosmic night. But this universal night is not barren: it is the fertile void from which all things, even light itself, are born.

Night is profoundly in our souls and minds, our hearts and bodies. It is woven into our language. There are a thousand and one Arabian nights and each night has a thousand eyes. There is music in the night and a nightingale sings in Barclay Square. Night crawlers glisten on residential lawns, while downtown, night owls rub shoulders with fly-by-nights. The Victorians slept in nightshirts by the glow of their oil-burning night-lights. We used to don nightcaps for bed-now we down a couple before calling it a night. Soldiers use night vision on midnight patrols, as night porters dream of nightclubs where night- hawks party into the wee hours. There are night watchmen, night- walkers, and night stalkers. Ladies of the night come and go, speaking of Caravaggio. And finally, there is the night before the night of nights.

Every landscape, every geography, every place on our planet has its own unique flavor of darkness. But even within that local flavor, each night can be different from the night before, even if sometimes it seems the same night can replay for weeks. There are summer nights when the air is charged with erotic anticipation. There are cool autumn nights when vacant patios are lit by halogen floodlights-empty theaters waiting for a scene that will never be staged. There are deep nights when the planets gather in the sky like moons and the twilight is as blue as a Thai sapphire. In the Arctic there are nights that last for months, nights when the dark hours are so cold that rubber tires freeze solid, become brittle enough to shatter with a single blow from a hammer. There are Caribbean nights above shining palm trees that glitter in the moonlight, their shadows punctuating the smooth white beach like asterisks-the air fragrant with jasmine. And there are city nights inhabited by pacing insomniacs, where streetlights shine through wind-restless trees to cast sliding mosaic shadows on the pavement. There are cold April nights in the Swedish countryside, where small streams form geometric fingers of ice at their edges.

But what is night? For the American poet Robinson Jeffers, night was a kind of luminous darkness, the calm center of beauty: the splendor without rays, the shining shadow, / Peace-bringer, the matrix of all shining and quieter of shining. When something is as common and familiar as night is, it becomes hard to describe, in fact to even discern, what its exact qualities are. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it simply as The period of darkness which intervenes between day and day, that part of the natural day during which no light is received from the sun, the time between evening and morning. When I started researching this subject, I asked myself, what could I possibly discover about night that most of my readers dont already know? What could I say about it that everyone hasnt experienced? After all, night is much more than commonplace: its occurrence is completely ubiquitous, predictable, and inevitable. But as I began to gather information, to read what novelists and poets and scientists had written about night, I soon realized that it was a huge, labyrinthine topic.

What started as a trickle of leads and connections soon turned into a torrent of information-more and more aspects of night that I hadnt considered, or even known about, revealed themselves to me. Books, music, magazines, and movies began to pile up in my study, and as file folders (both physical and digital) became stuffed and overflowing, I realized that the culture of night was extraordinarily rich with mythology, romance, medicine, superstition, natural history, art, magic, festivals, dreams, music, science, psychology, and even economics.

This book is a record of my exploration of night, my excitement and sometimes my amazement at what night portends, how it moves and shapes us. I was surprised, for example, to find out that the most fundamental aspect of night, its darkness, isnt at all straightforward. The fact that the entire night sky wasnt as bright as the sun itself was an enigma only solved by science in the 1920s, well after Einstein had written his general theory of relativity. I also learned that sleep isnt necessarily a healing period; in truth it is sometimes quite the opposite. I discovered that there are vampire-like parrots called keas that prey on sheep in the New Zealand dusk. I became familiar with the U.S. Naval Observatorys three stages of twilight. I talked to firework technicians and city councilors, to cab drivers and sex trade workers, to police officers and naturalists. I became a student of the night.