On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. If it were for our powers of self-detraction and forgetfulness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us would seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared—disappeared—there is the whole history of a man, or of a world, or of an infusoria.
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime
‘Tis the year’s midnight…
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays…
The world’s whole sap is sunk…
— John Donne, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”
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Winter sends the world to sleep; the wood in winter is as hushed as a temple, in contrast to May, when it resounds to birdsong and picnickers. And so we come to the night, the great, dark, continent of quiet.
— John Lewis-Stempel, Night Life
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Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on.
— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
O sons of men,
Lean death perches on your shoulder
Looking down into your cup of wine,
Looking down on the breasts of your lady.
You are caught in the web of the world
And the spider Nothing waits behind it.
— The Thousand and One Nights, tr. E. Powys Mathers
The place and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave…
— Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire