Midnight is nowhere near the middle of the night; most people are only in the shallows of their sleep when the calendar sweeps out the old day and delivers a new one in its place. But it is still the hour when coaches turn back into pumpkins.
On the night of December 31, 1999, I sat up to watch the end of the world, an event that had been scheduled for midnight that day. For several years, humanity had been on notice about the Y2K bug, a piece of mischief that was going to cause planes to fall out of the sky because the computers that ran our lives had never been told that one day 99 would tick over to 00. I spent the evening with a group of fellow priests who were on holiday; they might otherwise have taken a professional interest in the apocalypse but they weren’t too concerned, except for one who wanted to finish his doctorate before it happened. A venerable father took a laconic view of the situation. He told me that the apocalypse would hardly be the end of the world.
This hadn’t stopped years of scaremongering, which is always good for the economy. A paper manufacturer had banked on the slogan “Y2K. If in doubt, print it out.” Firms appointed Y2K compliance officers and householders stockpiled baked beans and bottled water. In the end, nothing happened. Perhaps we are yet to feel the full impact of the Y2K bug, but so far it’s been quiet.
The whole pointless kerfuffle about the Y2K bug is a reminder that both the calendar and the clock are artificial constructs, human fences imposed over the natural landscape of time. The year 2000 for western Christians was 5760 for Jewish people, 2544 for Buddhists, 1716 for Coptics, and 1420 for Muslims. It’s odd how religions, which are supposed to be a celebration of timelessness, have been so tangled up in measuring time. Let’s not even start on the arguments about the date of Easter.
Sleep, however, does create a rhythm of time. Research has found that when people are deprived of any external prompts such as windows and clocks, they will settle into a pattern of sleep that follows a cycle of twenty-four hours, usually just a little longer. In other words, days and months and years are not inventions. The tools we use to number them are.
The way sleep ebbs and flows over a day is called a circadian rhythm. Jet lag is a problem because it disrupts this rhythm: the traveler’s internal clock gets unhinged from the external clock, and common wisdom says that flying east is worse than flying west because it is more difficult to cope with shortening days than lengthening ones. Shift work can produce the same effects as long-distance travel without the pluses: there aren’t too many people who send cheery postcards from the lunchroom in the wee hours of the morning.
Different people have different rhythms, and the rhythm changes over the course of a lifetime. There are genuinely such things as larks and owls, people who are more alert in the morning and those who can solve crossword puzzles at midnight. Teenagers tend to be owls. They aren’t just refusing to go to bed to annoy their parents. It appears that with all the extra work expected of hormones in adolescence, and all the other secrets that need to be explored, an eighteen-year-old body doesn’t get around to secreting melatonin, the hormone produced in the pineal glad to organize sleep and the circadian rhythm, until about 11:00 PM. So when a teenager or young adult turns in to bed at 3:00 AM and stays there until midday, it is physiological rather than rebellious behavior. In later years, melatonin starts to be released about 9:00 PM, the same time that body temperature begins to fall, another prelude to sleep. There has been some sturdy evidence to suggest that teenagers do better in schools that take their circadian rhythms into account and start classes later in the morning. It is possible that adolescents are less adolescent during the holidays, when they can sleep according to their body clocks. Moodiness and irritability may be signs of poor sleep. Old people produce less melatonin: they tend to become larks, getting up earlier and sleeping less overall, often in broken stretches. The elderly who wake at night worrying about their adult children would most probably wake up anyway. It’s good of their children to oblige them with a reason other than advancing years.
Midnight is no more than a line in the air. It is neither the darkest part of the night nor the coldest, nor the time when anyone is most likely to howl at the moon. Yet it is a powerful image in demonology; midnight is the so-called “witches sabbath” when creatures from the dark side do their thing. But Christians also celebrate Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, a feast whose timing was established to get a free ride on the back of earlier festivals marking the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The image of Christmas is the star; it is a festival not of light but of light in darkness, one whose deepest roots are old. Midnight has political nuances: the independence of India at that moment on August 15, 1947, has occasioned books such as Midnight’s Children and Freedom at Midnight. In the sphere of private experience, midnight has also long been held as a pregnant moment, apt for both godly and ungodly visitings. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a tortured insomniac; his sleep had been land-mined by opium. Yet one of his most tender poems, “Frost at Midnight,” written at the close of the 18th century, celebrates a poised moment when all the world stands still. In practice, for Coleridge, such moments were pure fiction. But they are a beautiful fiction nonetheless. Coleridge writes,
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
’Tis calm indeed! So calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness.
The tales of A Thousand and One Nights start at midnight. They are sometimes called The Arabian Nights and sometimes The Scheherazade, but really they should be called A Thousand Nights and One Night, the extra night on top of the perfect thousand being a gesture toward infinity, a concept enshrined within the Islamic cultures that, in various places over hundreds of years, first told these joyous and wily stories. They include “Sinbad the Sailor” and “Aladdin and his Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” They are huddled together under an umbrella narrative that goes like this: There once was a king called Shahryar who was cheated on by his wife, so he decided to take his revenge on all womankind, marrying a virgin every night, having sex, and then putting her to the sword at dawn before she could cheat on him. It is understandable that some readers don’t get beyond this point; the text is blasé about these lives. After three years, however, the people are starting to get a bit restless and flee from the city until, in the words of Richard Burton’s 19th-century translation, “there remained not in the city a young person fit for carnal copulation.” A number of readers who have struggled past the three hundred beheadings find this a bit much: the sex drought seems more of a worry than the deaths. The chief Wazir is grief-stricken because he has run out of virgins to offer the king, and he fears for his life. But the Wazir has two daughters: Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Shahrazad has read a thousand books. She has studied science, philosophy, and poetry. She is wise and witty and has a bright idea. She marries the king, arranging for Dunyazad to be present in the bridal chamber when “the king arose and did away with his bride’s maidenhead and the three fell asleep.” At midnight, Dunyazad asks her sister to tell a story. Shahrazad obliges, but at dawn when she is due to lose her head, the story is not finished. The King agrees to allow her to finish it the next night. But by then the story has doors opening off it leading into other stories and the king is entranced, ready to be lead through interlocking rooms and corridors of these beguiling stories.
Many of the stories are both profound and profane at the same time. There’s one little one about Abu Hasan, a nomad who moves to the city and marries. He becomes a rich man and his wife dies. All this takes about four lines: the stories can be biblical in their ability to leave out the stuff you really want to know and leave in the stuff you don’t. Abu Hasan’s friends urge him to marry again, but he resists until finally he agrees to marry a woman whose beauty, we are told, is like that of a midnight star reflected in the ocean. So the biggest wedding feast ever seen in that country takes place, and in due course, the steward arrives to accompany Abu Hasan to the chamber where his bride is “displayed in her seven dresses and one more.” This is the moment of sexual tension in the story. Abu Hasan arises solemnly from the table, but at that very moment, he farts. Not just any fart, but a fart to do justice to the banquet he has just eaten, a fart that Burton describes as “great and terrible,” a fart so loud that every guest “talked aloud and made as though he had heard nothing, fearing for his life.” Farting has had a varied relationship with bedtime rituals: in some cultures it is accepted as an economical means for heating up the bed, in others it is grounds for divorce.
Abu Hasan was so humiliated by his fart that he left his own wedding, went down to the port, and got into a boat for India where he stayed for ten years. At the end of that time, he was homesick and longed to hear his mother tongue once again. So he disguised himself as a dervish and crept home by a secret route “enduring a thousand hardships of hunger, thirst and fatigue; and braving a thousand dangers from the lion, the snake and the Ghul.” The ghul is a demon that robs graves, often disguised as a hyena. Eventually, however, Abu Hasan reaches his own country, his own town. And there he hears a ten-year-old girl talking to her mother. The girl asks her mother when she was born. The mother replies, “Thou wast born, O my daughter, on the very night when Abu Hasan farted.” Abu Hsan realizes that, far from having been forgotten, his disgrace is now the event from which time is measured. So he gets up and goes back to India where he lives out the rest of his days.
For all its silliness, this little story charms its way into a deeper place. Abu Hasan tries to deal with his disgrace first by running and then by disguise. But the past is patient. It waits for him to come back to it. Time stands still for as long as it takes the proud and restless to listen to what it has to say.
Shahrazad weaves a great quilt of stories. A thousand and one midnights come and go, and the tales become even more captivating. During this time, Shahrazad presents the king with three sons, so she did most of her storytelling while pregnant, another poignant image. After so long, the king is a new man, transformed by the power of all he has heard.
The Thousand Nights and One Night is a model of an entire civilization: we all tell stories to save our lives, and we listen to them to save the lives of others. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a great adventure in which stories are told to pass the time. But Shahrazad tells stories for the opposite reason: to hold time still, to allow one midnight to last forever. The final night ends with a blessing: “Glory be to the living in who dieth not and in whose hands are the keys of the unseen and the seen. Glory be to the one whom the shifts of time waste not away.”