Good Night
Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark
by Christopher
Dewdney
Bloomsbury, 2004
(313 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past
by A. Roger Ekirch
W. W. Norton, 2005
(447 pages, $25.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Russell D. Moore
I could never “say my prayers” kneeling by a bedside. I always found it easier to pray while walking along, looking upward at the starry expanse, hearing nothing but a whippoorwill in the pine tree above me and the distant sound of an interstate highway miles and miles away.
I miss the night, now that I live in a nicely manicured subdivision with easy access to the grocery store, lots of neighbors, and so many artificial lights that one can barely, barely see the sky—never well enough to evoke anything close to awe. These two volumes remind us that our artificially lit atmosphere is not the way it’s always been.
Good Night & Good Luck
Christopher Dewdney, a Canadian poet, explores the mystery of the night. For children, nighttime is unmistakably adult, a time forbidden to them by their sleep schedules. He identifies the mystery of night in the psychologically sophisticated children’s book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, in which a timeless dimension, “a great green room” shows the gradual passing of time as each page grows dimmer and dimmer.
For Dewdney, the mysteriousness of night for children gives way to the anguish of the night for many adults. He points to contemporary plagues of insomnia, sleep paralysis, sleep apnea, and night terrors. He sets the often scientific fears of post-Enlightenment humans (Do I need to see a sleep therapist?) alongside the more supernatural fears of our forebears (Do I hear a werewolf?).
He notes that night is not accidentally associated with mischief and outright evil. Yes, “nightclubs” offer all kinds of “adult” naughtiness, but the night also provides cover for gang murders in the inner city and the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan.
But the night is about more than fear. “The night sky has told us more about our place within the cosmos than has the day,” he concludes. He suggests that while the daytime sky can give us the illusion that we are sheltered beneath a cloud of blue, the night sky “opens up into space, it stretches out forever.” It speaks to us something of eternity, of infinity. Perhaps this is why night evokes so much artistic expression in painting, poetry, and song.
Points of Light
Russell D. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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