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.
The thick-walled room’s cave-darkness, cool in summer, soothes by saying, This is the truth, not the taut cicada-strummed daylight. Rest here, out of the flame—the thick air’s stirred by the fan’s four slow-moving spoons; under the house the stone has its feet in deep water. Outside, even the sun god, dressed in this life as a lizard, abruptly rises on stiff legs and descends blasé toward the shadows.
This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze.
And I, what fountain of fire am I among This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed About like a shadow buffeted in the throng Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.
A spring evening—one priceless moment. The smell of fresh flowers and the glow of the moon. Sweet song drifts down from the balcony—beautiful. The garden swing hangs motionless as evening drips away.
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.
The rutted roads are all like iron; skies Are keen and brilliant; only the oak-leaves cling In the bare woods, or the hardy bitter-sweet; Drivers have put their sheepskin jackets on; And all the ponds are sealed with sheeted ice That rings with stroke of skate and hockey-stick, Or in the twilight cracks with running whoop. Bring in the logs of oak and hickory, And make an ample blaze on the wide hearth. Now is the time, with winter o’er the world, For books and friends and yellow candle-light, And timeless lingering by the settling fire.
While all the shuddering stars are keen with cold.
II
Out from the silent portal of the hours, When frosts are come and all the hosts put on. Their burnished gear to march across the night And o’er a darkened earth in splendor shine, Slowly above the world Orion wheels His glittering square, while on the shadowy hill And throbbing like a sea-light through the dusk, Great Sirius rises in his flashing blue. Lord of the winter night, august and pure, Returning year on year untouched by time, To hearten faith with thine unfaltering fire, There are no hurts that beauty cannot ease, No ills that love cannot at last repair, In the victorious progress of the soul.
III
Russet and white and gray is the oak wood In the great snow. Still from the North it comes, Whispering, settling, sifting through the trees, O’erloading branch and twig. The road is lost. Clearing and meadow, stream and ice-bound pond Are made once more a trackless wilderness In the white hush where not a creature stirs; And the pale sun is blotted from the sky. In that strange twilight the lone traveller halts To listen to the stealthy snowflakes fall. And then far off toward the Stamford shore, Where through the storm the coastwise liners go, Faint and recurrent on the muffled air, A foghorn booming through the Smother–hark!
IV
When the day changed and the mad wind died down, The powdery drifts that all day long had blown Across the meadows and the open fields, Or whirled like diamond dust in the bright sun, Settled to rest, and for a tranquil hour The lengthening bluish shadows on the snow Stole down the orchard slope, and a rose light Flooded the earth with beauty and with peace. Then in the west behind the cedars black The sinking sun stained red the winter dusk With sullen flare upon the snowy ridge,– As in a masterpiece by Hokusai, Where on a background gray, with flaming breath A scarlet dragon dies in dusky gold.
Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive Leap off the rim of earth across the dome. It is a night to make the heavens our home More than the nest whereto apace we strive. Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, In swarms outrushing from the golden comb. They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: The living throb in me, the dead revive. Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, Life glistens on the river of the death. It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs Of radiance, the radiance enrings: And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.
The winter comes; I walk alone, I want no bird to sing; To those who keep their hearts their own The winter is the spring. No flowers to please—no bees to hum— The coming spring’s already come.
I never want the Christmas rose To come before its time; The seasons, each as God bestows, Are simple and sublime. I love to see the snowstorm hing; ‘Tis but the winter garb of spring.
I never want the grass to bloom: The snowstorm’s best in white. I love to see the tempest come And love its piercing light. The dazzled eyes that love to cling O’er snow-white meadows sees the spring.
I love the snow, the crumpling snow That hangs on everything, It covers everything below Like white dove’s brooding wing, A landscape to the aching sight, A vast expanse of dazzling light.
It is the foliage of the woods That winters bring—the dress, White Easter of the year in bud, That makes the winter Spring. The frost and snow his posies bring, Nature’s white spurts of the spring.
Sundays too my father got up early And put his clothes on in the blueback cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
O Winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire, What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire The streams than under ice. June could not hire Her roses to forego the strength they learn In sleeping on thy breast. No fires can burn The bridges thou dost lay where men desire In vain to build. O Heart, when Love’s sun goes To northward, and the sounds of singing cease, Keep warm by inner fires, and rest in peace. Sleep on content, as sleeps the patient rose. Walk boldly on the white untrodden snows, The winter is the winter’s own release.
All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.
Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.