The subject of the day is: Night! Following on from last weeks topic of communal yawning.
One of my favourite books is ‘At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past’ by A. Roger Ekrich which explores the history and rituals of night. The history of night time is dense and thick - like a mist! Which is what people used to think night time was, according to our A. Roger Ekrich:
Evening does not arrive, it thickens. Wayfarers were ‘overtaken’ as if enveloped by a black mist, not only seen but felt as the old testament recounts.
We cannot cover all of this mist in one post, so today we’ll scratch the starry surface of candlelight, before our transition into electric light during the industrial revolution. If you’ve ever seen summer camp you will know that our writers room is the official pre-industrial revolution fan club.
Let’s start by calling it what is wants to be called:
As a mark of its special nature, darkness in Britain and America was frequently known as the ‘night season’ or an ‘alternate reign’
Since the invention of gas light:
Our evening life has experienced an indescribable intensification, our pulse has accelerated, nervous excitation has been heightened; we have had to change our appearance, our behavior and our customs, because they had to be accommodated to a different light. Heightened exposure to artificial lighting, both at home and abroad, altered circadian rhythms as old as man himself.
At Day’s Close - A. Roger Ekrich
According to Home by Bill Bryson one of the side effects of electric light was
a reduction in enthusiasm for being alive
:0
I’m all for upping my enthusiasm for being alive, so my fiancé Raviv and I instituted an all candlelit shabbat this week. For those unfamiliar, Shabbat traditionally begins with the lighting of two candles which burn throughout the evening. During the pandemic, the lighting of these candles became a very soothing ritual to both of us, as it felt like an intentional way to mark the transition between the work day into the more mischievous ‘night season.’
As we move today from summer to fall, and my inbox fills up with emails about ‘transitional weather fashion,’ let’s talk about the transitional period between sunset and nightfall, which was once known in Iceland and most of Scandinavia as ‘Twilight Rest’
a hiatus during which it was too dim to ply one’s trade and too light to warrant candles or lamps. Persons instead reserved this hour before the evening’s tasks for rest, prayer and quiet conversation.
As a brief tangent (the ethos of slow motion multi tasking), I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on other famous times of the night:
5pm (for the purpose of this chart) - Twilight Rest, a time to rest and be peaceful on our road to night time.
6pm - Toddler’s Truce a British Television scheduling policy that terminated transmissions for an hour each weekday between 6 and 7pm, so that young children could be put to bed.
12am - Taylor Swift Midnights
2am - Taylor again
3am - ‘dead of night’ also called ‘the dead time’ or the ‘dead hour’ - was the most fearing time, and reputedly the darkest time of the evening. Ancient Romans called this interval intempesta (without time).
4am phenomenon - there are seemingly endless pop culture references to 4am which you can explore in The Museum of Four in the Morning. This explains why Taylor, always forging her own path, has cornered the market on midnight and 2am.
Please help me fill in the blanks in the comments section.
In the past, with the absence of street lamps, darkness re-established the supremacy of the natural world, and even the tracking of the setting sun was a practice in staying in tune with nature:
Marigold petals began to close. Flocks of crows returned to their nests, and rabbits grew more animated. The pupils of goats and sheep, normally oval in shape, appeared round. ‘The goats' eyes were my clock’ recalled Ulrich Braker.
At Day’s Close - A. Roger Ekrich
They think that the phrase ‘everything has its place’ may relate to the fact that as night fell, you needed to know how to locate your things:
Individuals long committed to memory the internal topography of their dwellings, including the exact number of steps in every flight of stairs; there was often a handmade notch in the wood railing leading to the second floor, located at an abrupt right turn up the stairs.
Pre candlelight I did a little walk through of the house and reminded myself where the toe stubbing parts were. Then I cracked open a thrift store find: ‘Knowing the Outdoors in the Dark’ by Vinson Brown.
Vinson rather poetically prepares you for evening by saying:
It is wise to move cautiously in the outdoors at night because there may be some dangers (described in chapter 13)* but beware of fear and panic because they may become more dangerous than anything else in the night.
We were spending our candlelit evening indoors, but it’s always good to be reminded that fear and panic are sum negative. Vinson Brown also advises making a protective tent with eye holes so that you can sit for long periods outside observing the night time creatures. I did not do this in my house as I do not think my night time creature (Raviv) would have appreciated it.
Thinking about moving differently when darkness fell, reminded of this beautiful passage from ‘Here I Am’ by Jonathan Safran Foer about a families night time rituals, and something that Raviv and I did when we first moved into our house. I still feel more familiar with the corners of this house then any other i’ve lived in:
After dinner, they performed a ritual whose origin no one could remember and whose meaning no one questioned: they closed their eyes and walked around their house. It was fine to speak, to be silly, to laugh, but their blindness always became silent. Over time, they developed a tolerance for the dark quiet and could last for ten minutes, then twenty. They would meet back at the kitchen table, and then open their eyes together. Each time it was revelatory. Two revelations: the foreignness of a home the children had lived in their entire lives, and the foreignness of sight.
After our candlelit shabbat, I also tried drawing in the dark. I couldn’t really see the drawing, the objects I was drawing, or the colours I was using all that well. At one point I left the room to get a cup of tea and when I came back I couldn’t remember where I placed the pink pen so I used orange instead. When I came into my office the next morning I saw the drawing in the daylight for the first time and it felt akin to the anticipation of picking up my photos from Snappy Snaps.
You can buy the original of this drawing here.
I was a big fan of this process. I have a fair amount of anxiety and as a result move like the devil is chasing me. I am constantly bumping my knees, smacking my hands and falling over. *Chapter 13 of Knowing the Outdoors in the Dark reminds us: “fear may cause a person to run wildly and so land, without meaning to, in a place of great danger.” Let’s not forget that people used to find (still do) night time implicitly scary, but evil spirits “love not the smell of lamps,” according to Plato, so we’re good.
Living by candlelight made me appreciate the natural world and move with more intention, but what I loved most was that it allowed me to slow down, and sit in the dark mist of night.
As E.L. Doctorow said:
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way
For those who may practice a candlelit evening, I share this prayer from the past:
‘Father, son and holy ghost, that these houses may not turn to toast.’
and of course this one from grapejuiceboys:
Let me know if you try an evening of resting your electric light and any other thoughts in the comments section. Happy transitional weather day!
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I’m in my third year of a five year long engineering degree program (towards two bachelors degrees) and I’ve sort of bastardized nighttime for me.
Before university I was an extremely early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of person, and I was already sleepy and in bed by around 9-10pm every night.
But I am a serial procrastinator, and I have extreme anxiety of the huge amount of work and studying I am presented with each day, a lot of this anxiety goes towards just putting everything off until it’s 10pm and I have a load of work to do before 8am the next day.
This work isn’t like High School where I could just do the homework quickly and move on, everything is about deep understanding of the content; and trying to comprehend complex mathematical and scientific things - something I can do, but I would much rather be doodling or reading or listening to music.
I wish I could treat nighttime as a sacred time of darkness, and silence, and of rest. Just surrender myself to the night season. Enjoy candlelight. Instead my eyes are aching each night with the light from my iPad (something that will definitely reduce happiness after 9pm) reading up on all the work I need to catch up on, 10pm starts to feel more like 4pm, and 4 in the morning starts to feel more like bedtime.
Just thought I’d add some of the thoughts I had while reading.
Thank you for this lovely read, and I wish you well in the paid subscription model! Your posts are so lovely, they are written and researched so well. I hope that I can support you.
I have a bonus hourly nickname! I don't know if my mom was told this by her mother growing up or found this term on her own (she does I Ching and knows a lot of astrology + superstitious lore), but when I was growing up she would always refer to 4am (and sometimes 4pm) as the hour of the wolf. She said 4 in the morning is the most uncanny and listless time of night, where chaotic/bad things are more likely happen and human beings have less control/agency. She would warn me to beware of being up that late and would assure me that if anything bad happened at 4pm in the afternoon, it wasn't my fault and it was only because of the hour of the wolf.