The Peacefulness of Night

Night is a phase that generally covers a significant chunk of the daily cycle. The further you are from the equator, the exact length of night will depend more and more on the time of the year. As a matter of fact, once you enter Earth’s polar regions, the time of the year could result in it covering the entire daily cycle or none of it at all. But no matter where you are, on the average calendar day, night is just under half of the daily cycle – giving up a small part of its half to the transitional periods known as “dusk” and “dawn”.

Yet as significant a part of the daily cycle as it is – it is a phase that most people go to great length to avoid. For starters, many people sleep through as much of it as they possibly can. As for those who don’t, they still try to avoid it in their own way. They restrict themselves as much as possible to areas which they can illuminate so intensely with artificial lights that they have to look through a window to the outdoors just to be able to be aware that the daylight of one day has expired and that of the next is yet to come.

This avoidance of the nocturnal is, of course, something that I never really understood. True, there are advantages, even necessary functions of daylight. But the hours of darkness have something special about them too that is quite unappreciated.

I suppose that the first signs that I respond differently to night than many other people came when I was a small child. My sister and I would wake up early in the morning for swim practice. Before leaving we would have a small breakfast – enough to fuel us through the morning workout, but not enough to weigh us down. I would often get to the kitchen first and start eating my breakfast in the dark – a darkness that I found to be comfortable and peaceful.

This peace would come to a sudden and harsh end when my sister got into the room. The first thing she would do would be to turn on the lights – those little bulbs of intrusion that took away the peacefulness of the night in which I was enjoying my breakfast. My sister was and still is a wonderful human being – but in these moments where she stole the comforting nocturnal darkness from me, I would be quite cross with her.

It didn’t occur to me until many years later that the reason why she would interrupt my nocturnal bliss the way she did might have been for a very simple reason – that being that turning on the kitchen lights may have been as natural for her as leaving them off was for me.

Even today, as an adult, I find that my sense of peace and wellbeing and even my productivity are increased if when I am up at night, I do my whatever chores I must in an environment in which night isn’t just an hour on a clock, but an actual visceral reality. I use the fixture lights in my home very little – and when I do, it is mostly during the daylit hours. Instead, at night, I light my way around the apartment with a lantern.

Now, if you’re picturing me with a nineteenth-century oil lantern, you are quite mistaken. I find those things to be rather smelly – not to mention possible fire risk that they might impose. Even for my own sake, these are enough reasons to refrain from using those – not to mention how living in a large building obligates me to be considerate of my neighbors as well. Instead, I use an LED lantern. They are much less smelly – can turn on and off without the need for any lighter – and give me many more options where I can hang or place them without having to worry about them catching something on fire. Best of all – if I forget to turn an LED lantern off when I fall asleep, the worst that can happen is a waste of battery power.

Granted – some models of LED lanterns are so badly designed as to be effectively useless, and others are so abrasive as to present their own threat to the tranquility of the night. However, over the years, I find that I get better and better (though still always having more to learn) at knowing which models outperform others as good lighting options for the connoisseur of night.

Can I avoid entirely the bright lights that others use to ward the night off? Not entirely. For starters, unless I want to be secluded in my home from nightfall to the rise of morning, I have to share space with other people, most of who don’t share my preference for keeping the night time night-like. I don’t have as active a social life as I’d like – but what social activities I do have, I don’t want to pass them up just because the places where people meet are too brightly lit.

And even if I have to step outside for a small errand like taking out the trash, I have to step into a hallway that is lit not according to my own preferences, but the preferences of an entire community, most of who don’t share my appreciation of the dark phase of the daily cycle. For a brief period of the night, those lights are dimmed somewhat (I suppose for the purpose of conserving electricity) but most of the night, they are at full brightness.

I am not complaining, of course. I only have to endure this full barrage of light for a brief amount of time – and then it is back to my peaceful apartment. And I fully appreciate the safety reasons why this brightness needs to be there. But I can’t help but wonder if the brightness level exceeds that which is necessary for safety reasons – if the degree, the intensity of the hallway’s illumination has anything to do with society’s collective aversion to being truly in the presence of the night.