As Night Gathers

I love night! There’s something about the play of light and shadows–the sometimes almost-perfect silence… until the crickets start their song.

I love the spots of light: fireflies flashing back and forth in the gathering darkness, the lights off down the road (or on the hillside, remembered). Night is filled with mystery, and it’s all about the unknown/unknowable–the unseen.

Beautiful Night

In Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham, wrote: “It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body.” The coming of night, the sounds of night, and the dreamy quality of the experience — it all takes on a groggy sense of splendor.

I find myself, lying awake, writing lines… remembering passages, and working through the bookish scenarios in my mind. Since everyone is asleep, I suppose the ideas must all be mine — to frame and slant and intertwine. I feel most alive, as though my brain has suddenly been set free.

Anything is possible… or nothing is…

Time stands still, and for a few hours, I forget that I’m so tired. Exhausted.

As Charles Lanman says, in “Musings,” “I turn my face from the light, and looking into some dark corner, my mind is led to wander in that mysterious world created by the genius of Dante. Soon, this little taper will flicker in the socket, and leave behind it a world of gloom.—Is it not so with life?”

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