The night is not simply a time for sleeping. For all those who do not wish to reveal their thoughts to their pillows alone, a vibrant time opens up after darkness. At night the diurnal world undergoes reflection and commentary. At night we encounter another way of reckoning time; a time that cannot be reckoned; a time of reckoning. Indeed, some people actually need a portion of night on a daily basis so they can be enclosed in silence, apart from everyone else. Whether we regularly stay awake after dark or do so only sporadically, on the threshold between the past day and the next, consigned neither to unconscious sleep nor to the routine of mundane consciousness, the night offers each of us a heightened attentiveness. We are alone with our thoughts, feelings, and sensuous perceptions. More intensely than during the day, we experience the passing of time, an uncertain proximity of space that we occupy completely for ourselves. Uninhibited, under the protection of darkness, we can give ourselves over to memories or fantasies, but also to doubts, wild conjectures, and anxieties. Contours and borders become blurred, flowing together with the certainties of the day. We can think in ambivalences and contradictions, entertain the invention of impossible worlds, and discover in spirit those realms that are foreign to our ordinary lives.
It is from my mother that I first learned the charm of living the night. In the morning, we were never sent off to school with one of those kind-but-firm maternal looks. My mother slept late, until midday, and only really came alive at night. She was my first queen of the night. Whenever she went to a party, the theater, or the opera, she would come and check on us in our room after my siblings and I were already long in bed. There was never enough time for a bedtime story. Instead, she sat with us and gently spoke to us, easing the transition into sleep. After she left our room, a trace of her perfume hung in the air, the sound of the tulle and silk of her evening gown continued to resonate in our ears; the image of her elegant appearance lingered in our imagination. Her splendid evening gown served as a promise: Awaiting us, too, was a fascinating world of parties, boisterous pleasure, and risky gambling, later on, when we were older. This luminous figure, whose jewelry sparkled uncannily in the light from the nightstand lamp and who seemed both elevated and enchanted, was not the mother with whom we were familiar. Her brief appearance signaled that she was about to enjoy a nocturnal existence separate from ours. By way of intimation, she let us partake in the heightened mood awaiting her. This seductive perception would launch our dreams.
Later, nighttime continued to be my mother’s time. If I was out with friends for the evening at a party, and we were bored but didn’t want to go home yet, I could call on her at any hour. She would greet us at the front door, dressed in a stylish house robe, and lead us into the living room where she reopened the bar. We would stay for hours on end, having unreal conversations whose charm consisted in saying everything without inhibition because we were enveloped in quiet darkness. From my mother, I learned to share intimacies with others, to develop thoughts making me attentive to things hitherto unfamiliar, whenever I found myself in a night different from the ordinary night. I’ve often asked myself what she was doing those many hours all alone, what she gleaned from the organizing, reading, or contemplation she seemed to need every night. She would have wanted to read a book about the night. It would have been her kind of book. After learning in the hospital that the cancer she’d had for years had suddenly metastasized, she told me soberly: “Now I won’t be able to read the book you wanted to write for me.” The harbinger of my dreams of exotic delights became, unexpectedly and inexorably, the mother of death; the herald of another night completely inaccessible to me.
Yet the memories of my mother’s penchant for the night indelibly left their mark on my turn to philosophical and aesthetic texts that discover the night so as to reveal a thinking of the other, of the outside. Unlike any phenomenological experience of the world after dark, the night linguistically created in philosophical, fictional, and cinematic texts is at once bounded and unbound; a sanctuary, a promise, and a chance. Even if it must inevitably give way to the light of the dawn, this aesthetically reimagined night veers toward the infinite, insofar as we are willing to engage with the intensities and ideas it contains. Indeed, in such a conceptually rediscovered night, memories of departed or lost worlds return. It harbors the hope that the past will continue to affect the future. In December 1513, from his exile in San Andrea in Percussina, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in a letter to his patron, Francesco Vettori:
When the evening comes, I return home and enter my study. At the threshold, I cast off my peasant’s clothes, filled with dirt and excrement. I then get dressed in splendid court garments and, suitably attired, step into the columned halls of the great ancients. Received by them in friendship, I nourish myself there with food meant for me alone, that for which I was born. There, no shame holds me back from talking to them, asking them why they did certain things; and they condescend to answer me. For four hours, I have no worries. I forget my sorrows, am not afraid of poverty. Death does not scare me. I completely enter their world.
I have come to realize that if the night was the preferred site for conversations with the dead, for exchanges with the imaginary worlds of our ancestors, then I would have to engage in a critical reading of these conversations so as to preserve my own rediscovery of this charmed chronotopos. To chart my own journey into the night, I therefore chose to map the aesthetically refigured night in different thematically oriented domains. In the first part of this book, I address how a range of cosmogonies deploy the night as their privileged conceptual metaphor so as to offer philosophical discussions of how the world, and with it human beings, the soul, and the realm of imagination come into being. In the next four parts, I turn more directly to literary and cinematic texts, foregrounding nocturnal scenes that function as
the stage for dreams, hallucinations, and the creation of artistic worlds. In other texts, these nocturnal settings emerge as the site for a moral struggle between good and evil, for a battle with internal and external demons. In still further texts I found that the night could also serve as the point of departure for a discovery of the limits of certainty and self-knowledge. Traveling to the end of the night often means wrestling with the forces of destiny, culminating in a choice between life and death. Finally, and most unexpectedly, I came to discover that the night brings with it a psychic condition that prepares one to enter into a new day illuminated neither by the light of a nocturnal sun nor clouded by madness (often conceived as a nocturnality of the psyche). Awakening at night leads to an awakening into and for the day. Something of what we experience in the dark of night can be taken into the morning after, and because of this recognition, the new day is different. Thinking about the day after awakening from a passage through the night, but also in reference to the night, brings with it an ongoing exchange between dreaming and awakening; between dissolving boundaries and drawing new demarcations; between transgression and ethics. The gift from my mother that I’ve taken with me on my own critical journey through literary, philosophical, and cinematic nights is precisely this insight into the resilient aftereffect the night has on the day.