This Metaphysics Of Night

Night is a saviour, it often saves, it usually does. Days come with their frightening surprises, with their charms only hiding lurking dangers, pain and deep diseases. And the myth of sunlight gives sweat and headache, uncomfortable surliness, irritation and lethargy. What begins with benign intentions sometimes snowballs into epic discomfort, pain in and inside everywhere, days fragmented, divided and destroyed. Days usually remind me of discipline, behaviour that is generally discrepant with thinking. Days make us subservient to desire, to ambition.

But nights are a different matter, from another world, a different planet. Nights bring wind, darkness and an unnameable curtain, a cover that covers everything, including our seethings, saving us from ourselves. Nights are different for they save us from further atrocities, from light, from sun, from openness, from wounds. Nights return us to our original state, to our primeval nature which is our natural state, to an inner dynamic of peace in darkness. They shield us from further questions for they cover us from further questions, leaving us in peace.

Nights are our natural reason to live amongst so many other reasons to die. The wolfish loneliness outside is matchless. We are far from all crowds, from friends and hypocrisy, including our own. If night is a hypocrite too, it is an honest one. Nights bring sinister peace and a romantic awareness of a priceless melancholy which no day can ever give, even the last day of love, the last moment of parting. These nights are priceless for they hold a mirror to ourselves, revealing what we are to what we think we could be, revealing our desires which are the truest thoughts we have for they are unadulterated, born of desire that is born of no thought.

Nights give us a priceless asylum from the hurried madness of days, from the humid faces of daylight, from the acrobatic clinginess of daytime love. Nights allow us to festoon and settle ourselves into the deep waters of dreams, into the honest psychology of the inner mind that is unknown to us. Nights return us to folds in our hearts that are not made of prior conceptions, that are not borrowed from other meanings, not steeped in words but stepped in the reality of hours stepped in real desire.

Nights don't often give us repose. I am familiar with insomnia, old friend. Yet, there is a promise of peace, even if a faint one. We can trust the fruit of this promise, the flavour of this sea, the magic invincibility of this trust. We can also think of deception, a defeat. But that will come with small hurried steps, away from the delirious pop music of daytime. We must learn to favour nighttime and ignore the harsh subterfuge of days, of daylight.
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