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.
Chronobiologists have also established that out of every ten people, eight follow a normal circadian cycle (that is, rising naturally at around 7:30 A.M.); one is a lark; and one is an owl. These settings are genetically encoded and cannot be erased. Once an owl, always an owl.
Given that I work for myself now, and thus set my own schedule, it would appear that I am a lark. I generally go to sleep between ten and ten-thirty, and generally get up around five-thirty with no need of an alarm. I rarely need more than seven hours of sleep, unless I’m recovering from traveling. And I do enjoy accomplishing things before breakfast. In fact, as soon as I finish jotting down the rudiments of this post, I’m heading out to the garage to take care of today’s work before the infernal heat begins constricting the life out of the day.
Yet for more than twenty years of my life, from adolescence to the brink of middle age, I was an owl by trade. Working in my family’s newspaper distributorship, I would usually go to sleep around nine, get up four hours later at one A.M. (with the help of an alarm), be at work by two, and be home by eight. Shortly thereafter, I’d get the remaining three hours of sleep I needed and wake up around noon to “start” my regular day. (At least one historian claims that this bifurcated pattern, which he calls “segmented sleep,” was actually the norm for humans before the invention of electric light corralled our sleep habits into one eight-hour block.) And while the genetic determinists might claim that I was only a lark in owl’s feathers, forced by the marketplace into denying my true nature, I loved my noctivagant life. If I were indeed a prisoner to false consciousness and unnatural obligations, I must have also had Stockholm Syndrome.
Oddly, my reading habits also changed along with my sleeping. Once I started keeping a normal schedule, I found it difficult to read during the day without getting drowsy. Now, the majority of my reading gets done in the couple hours before bed, where, for whatever reason, I can concentrate and stay alert better. The Lady of the House, by contrast, who is the ne plus ultra of larks, seems to lose all sense of time at night. She would happily go to sleep by 8:30 if I didn’t shame her out of it, and wails that it’s “practically midnight!” if I’m still reading at ten. I’m afraid she’ll never know what she’s missing. For though I may not be a full-fledged member of the genus Strix anymore, night has always been the domain of shapeshifters, and for those precious couple hours after dark, with a book in hand, I manage to inhabit the murky boundary between worlds once again.
People’s apprehensions intensified at night for very good reasons, including peaking adrenal hormones between 4:00 and 8:00 a.m., coupled with the loneliness of early morning hours. “Solitude, the night and fear makes all my danger double to appear,” wrote Henry Nevil Payne. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg reflected, “I have gone to bed at night quite untroubled about certain things and then started to worry fearfully about them at about four in the morning, so that I often lay tossing and turning for several hours, only to grow indifferent or optimistic again at nine or even earlier.”
In his wonderful project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig chooses the term “nighthawk” to vividly represent this experience:
n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.
The phenomenon of “mobbing” is well-known, where a group of smaller birds harass and chase a larger, predatory bird away from their territory. I see it all the time during the course of a typical day, with red-tailed hawks being plentiful in the area. As the name implies, though, their metaphorical cousins have evolved to prey at night, when the sparrows and wrens of optimism are sleeping and reluctant to be summoned to defense. I have yet to discover what sort of seed could tempt them to patrol in the small hours, but I will be glad to hang a feeder in my bedroom in the event that I do.
The book is inspired by a lifelong fascination with the night. I grew up listening to late-night radio baseball broadcasts in Detroit. I live very close to railroad tracks, so I was always haunted by the Hank Williams-like moan of the locomotives. And then I worked in a Detroit factory all night long through my college years.
In those years, where I started sleeping two or three hours a night, getting a pattern that has continued on, eventually I discovered that I had a lot of company out there. History is full of those who love to be up all night — from the poet Sappho to Galileo, of course, working on his telescopes; Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Churchill, Obama today. So I had a lot of company with this fascination of the night.
…There’s an old English proverb: “Night gives great counsel.” It’s very reflective. It’s a contemplative part of the day. So, at the solstice, which we’re celebrating today, one could think that it’s the shortest day — there’s only 9½ hours of light. My thought on it is that, “Sure, but we have 14½ hours of darkness with which to celebrate the end of winter and the fact that life is coming back again.”
He clicks off the reading lamp, and it is almost morning. Already the crows are calling and answering, making their own perfect sense, and the sun is steadily, imperceptibly, climbing the east hills to wash away the dark night of words, the ancient litanies of pain and death scarcely interrupted by the occasional cry of a neighbor’s chained dog or a nearby owl. Soon it will be safe, for the world will step again into its garments, and light will seek out every corner, each black universal truth that haunts him. Has, how long? The day will rise to its obscure bright work, and he can sleep.
This is thy hour O soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth, emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.
Nightlong waiting and listening, being schooled To long lying awake without thoughts, I hear him calling from the other world. A long silence, and then two flutey notes— The cry of nobody, but urgent, cool, Full of foreboding. He’s in the cedar tree Not twenty feet beyond my window sill; The other world is very far away. When, towards morning, he ceases, the air seems More visible, although it’s not yet light, The black sky drained and all our speechless dreams Fading into thought. Lord of the night, Thy kingdom in which everything is one, Come, speak to me, speak to me once again.
For me, insomnia’s greatest gift is the uninterrupted time and mental space it allows for reading and thinking. There’s a freedom to the night, an unconstrained permissiveness. Under cover of darkness, anything goes. Being awake in the night feels like stealing a march on time. Senses sharpen, so does the memory. The air stills and it is as though you have passed into some other, more magical dimension in which earthly rules no longer apply. There’s an exploratory feeling to the night, a special magic, as anyone who regularly stays awake through it knows. The night’s sounds, smells and sights are exclusive. The quiet lends itself to brooding, even to epiphany, at the very least to an intense focus, what Seamus Heaney calls ‘the trance’ which can be both alluring and, for creativity, highly fruitful.
And so I think and I read.
That’s a beautiful little passage, and she’s right. I always loved that about working at night. For me, I think it was an extension of my extreme introversion more than anything else; being awake and active at night was a chance to be free from the prying eyes and intrusive approaches of other people. But yes, assuming you’re not awake due to being delirious with illness or caught in the grip of the night terrors, it does engender a certain psychological shift, a slight difference in perspective that I’ve always found beneficial for imagination. Much of the writing I’ve done here, up until a couple years ago, was actually done in my head while working at night.
When I was a kid, I used to be allowed to go to work with my dad on weekends or over summer vacation if I could be awake and ready to go on time (and I quickly learned that reading in order to avoid getting sleepy was a terrible strategy). I was always fascinated to see evidence of other people being awake at all hours, especially those who weren’t working like we were — why were they still up? What was different about their lives? As in most things, I’m sure the reality was far less interesting than the fantasy, but still, I sensed something attractive and intriguing about what it would mean to consciously choose to set yourself against the traditions and habits of everyone else. Overnight travelers, drunks looking for a place to sleep, or people working the graveyard shift for lack of any better options were transformed in my childish imagination into what I would later conceptualize as philosopher-poet-hermits, gently resisting the gravitational pull of normalcy and respectability.
Even as I got older, I’d still feel a fleeting sense of kinship at the sight of a lit bedroom window out in the suburbs, or a silhouette moving through the kitchen, or even the occasional person walking through a parking lot or alongside the road; not hitchhiking, not furtively sneaking around, just purposefully heading somewhere for their own reasons on their own schedule. We shadow people flitting about on the fringe. Eyes of awareness keeping solitary vigil.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
…that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain….
Dark hills against a hollow crocus sky Scarfed with its crimson pennons, and below The dome of sunset long, hushed valleys lie Cradling the twilight, where the lone winds blow And wake among the harps of leafless trees Fantastic runes and mournful melodies.
The chilly purple air is threaded through With silver from the rising moon afar, And from a gulf of clear, unfathomed blue In the southwest glimmers a great gold star Above the darkening druid glens of fir Where beckoning boughs and elfin voices stir.
And so I wander through the shadows still, And look and listen with a rapt delight, Pausing again and yet again at will To drink the elusive beauty of the night, Until my soul is filled, as some deep cup, That with divine enchantment is brimmed up.
Night-time when awake is perhaps the best time of all for the flow of ideas…. The spiritual aloneness that comes over the thinker when the world sleeps, carrying with it the sense of detachment so essential to a creative thinker may account partly for the fascination and spell of working by night. It is, however, a spell, to be resisted since it may lead to practices dangerous alike to bodily and mental health: Byron, sometimes writing on Hollands and water, Schiller on strong coffee, wine-chocolate, old Rhenish, or Champagne, the poet Crabbe at one time on weak brandy and water and snuff, and Balzac on endless cups of black coffee.
True, all true. Years ago, at a crossroads under the full moon, I made a deal with the devil stimulant, caffeine, in exchange for extraordinary intellectual insight and writing ability, and here you see the fruits of that diabolical bargain. Might it shave a few years off the end of my life? So be it.
Also true: the nocturnal musings were intensified further by the time I spent on long, lonely highways, livin’ after midnight, rockin’ till the dawn:
Harding also points to the importance of bodily posture and the habit of motion that many creators cultivated: Dickens and Hugo were avid walkers during ideation; Burns often composed while “holding the plough”; Twain paced madly while dictating; Goethe, Scott, and Burns composed on horseback; Mozart preferred the back of a carriage; Lord Kelvin worked on his mathematical studies while traveling by train. Harding offers:
It is possible that the rhythmical movement of a carriage or train, of a horse and to a much lesser degree of walking, may produce on sensitive minds a slightly hypnotic effect conducive to that state of mind most favourable to the birth of ideas.
I’ve always done some of my best thinking deep in the still of the night. And on that note, I recently came across an arresting passage from Thoreau’s essay Night and Moonlight:
“As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect.”
