At Large and At Small (8 page)

“Those who would bring great things to pass,” cautioned the eighteenth-century theologian Matthew
Henry, “must rise early.” In the medieval Benedictine horarium, the first
of the monk’s seven daily offices was observed at 3:15
A.M.
, the better to get a corner on virtue before anyone else could put in a competing bid. And at 4:30
A.M.
, is it any surprise that in 1660 one would have found John Milton, lustrous with matutinal rectitude, listening to a servant read aloud from the Hebrew Bible, while in 1890 one would have found the Irish journalist and pornographer
Frank Harris (on the rare nights when he was sleeping alone) finally nodding off after a night of unspeakable debauch?

The owl’s reputation may be beyond salvation. Who gets up early? Farmers, bakers, doctors. Who stays up late? Muggers, streetwalkers, cat burglars. It’s assumed that if you’re sneaking around after midnight, you must have something to hide. Night is the time of goblins, ghouls,
vampires, zombies, witches, warlocks, demons, wraiths, fiends, banshees, poltergeists, werefolk, bogeymen, and things that go bump. (It is also the time of fairies and angels, but, like many comforting things, these are all too easily crowded out of the imagination. The nightmare trumps the pleasant dream.) Night, like winter, is a metaphor for death: one does not say “the dead of morning” or “the
dead of spring.” In a strange and tenebrous book called
Night
(which every lark should be forced to read, preferably by moonlight), the British critic A. Alvarez (an owl) points out, glumly, that Christ is known as the Light of the World and Satan as the Prince of Darkness. With such a powerful pro-lark tradition arrayed against us, must we owls be forever condemned
to the infernal regions—which,
despite their inextinguishable flames, are always described as
dark
?

I
have tried hard to understand the lark’s perspective. Campbell Geeslin, the artist who carved our bedpost finials, retires at nine and rises at five. “I’ve gotten up early ever since I was a boy in West Texas,” he told me. “You’d look out of the window at dawn, and the sky would stretch on forever. It was a special creamy
color at that hour, before the clouds came. It was the only time when it was cool. The morning was clean and blank and full of promise, like a piece of paper no one had written on yet. I couldn’t wait to jump out of bed and invent something: a car, an airplane, a vacuum cleaner made from a spice can. By sunset, the day was used up, exhausted. Night was a time of disappointment, when you thought about
all the things you’d hoped to do and hadn’t done. There’s nothing as sad and lonely as the bark of a coyote somewhere off in the West Texas night, and the moon hanging outside your window as bone-white as an old cow skull.”

That’s persuasive testimony, but it’s not going to make me jump out of bed at five any more than a panegyric by a white water lily on the splendors of the morning is going
to make the evening primrose transplant itself in Linnaeus’s 6:00
A.M.
flower bed. My suprachiasmatic nucleus is stuck in the owl position, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Dawns are all very well (though I generally see them after staying up all night, when I may be
too sleepy to appreciate them), but they can’t hold a candle to a full moon, an aurora borealis, a meteor shower, or a comet.

In March of 1986, I was climbing with a friend on the Tasman Glacier in New Zealand. It occurred to us that if we got up at 1:00
A.M.
and walked northeast across the glacier, we might be able to see Halley’s Comet, which was making its every-seventy-sixth-year swing that month and could be best viewed (or so we had read) from the Southern Hemisphere. For my larkish companion, 1:00
A.M.
was an
early start; for me, it was simply an excuse to postpone my bedtime. We left the Tasman Saddle promptly at one, roped up, and put on our crampons in what seemed at first like pitch darkness but soon, once our eyes grew accustomed to the light of thousands of stars reflected on the shimmering glacier, seemed more like dusk. After crunching a mile or so across the clean hard snow, which had been unpleasantly
slushy in the afternoon sun, we stopped on a narrow col with a thousand-foot drop-off on either side. And there it was: a small white cornucopia above the northern horizon, not solid, but delicately stippled, as if produced by a heavenly dot-matrix printer. We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet
was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.

Surely the best thing about camping is the night. Night is what differentiates a camping trip from a series of day hikes. There are few greater pleasures than
stretching out in your tent, inside which a glowing candle lantern makes your muddy boots and damp wool socks look as if they were
painted by Georges de La Tour, and glimpsing, through the open flap, the corner of a constellation that is invisible from your hometown. (Since I live in New York City, that includes just about everything, even the Big Dipper.) There are sounds you wouldn’t hear at home, either: crickets, cicadas, tree frogs, loons, owls—even, on a memorable Catskills backpacking trip in my husband’s youth, the urgent
rustles of copulating porcupines. The contrast between the infinite space outside the tent and the cozily delimited interior, whose little zippers and pouches (for glasses, handkerchiefs, pocketknives) form a miniature simulacrum of a well-ordered pantry, nudges my memory back to the houses I used to make in my childhood by suspending a blanket over a table, dragging in a tray of cocoa and cookies,
and creating a private domestic zone in which the temperature was always warm and the light was always crepuscular. Hell may be a dark place, but so is the womb.

My husband inherited his larkishness, along with his Roman nose and his shaggy eyebrows, from his father, who would feel he had committed an act of irreparable sloth if he slept past 4:30
A.M.
I inherited my owlishness from a father
who shares Jimmy Walker’s conviction that it is a sin to go to bed on the same day you get up. Even if he retires at 2:00
A.M.
, my father cannot fall asleep without at least an hour of rigorous mental games. (He is the
sort of person who could never get drowsy counting sheep; he once told me that he just got wider and wider awake as the numbers mounted, since he had to make sure he was counting
correctly.) He composes puns, limericks, clerihews, palindromes, anagrams, and alphabetical lists of various kinds. An example of the last of these genres: Excluding the refractory
x
, which was long ago thrown out of the game, proceed through the alphabet from
a
to
z
, finding words that end with the letters
el
. Proper names are allowed. Solution: Abel, babel, channel, diesel, Edel, Fidel, Gödel…
and so on. The sailing was reasonably clear until my father got to
z
, a perennial troublemaker. It took an hour, from 4:00
A.M.
to 5:00
A.M.
, to come up with the name of a fellow reviewer at
The Nation
whom he had last seen sixty years earlier: Morton Dauwen Zabel. My father says that at the moment Mr. Zabel sidled into his consciousness, he was suffused with a sense of transcendent completion
greater than he had ever felt on signing a book contract or closing a deal.

Insomnia need not be disagreeable. When Annie Proulx can’t sleep, she puts on Quebec reels and dances around for half an hour in her bunny slippers. Until the fantasy wore thin with repetition, F. Scott Fitzgerald quarterbacked the Princeton team to hundreds of nocturnal victories over Yale. Lewis Carroll, like my father,
posed himself problems:

Q: If 70 per cent [of a group of pensioners] have lost an eye, 75 per cent an ear, 80 per cent an arm, 85 per cent a leg; what percentage,
at least
, must have lost all four?

A: Ten. Adding the wounds together, we get 70 + 75 + 80 + 85 = 310, among 100 men; which gives 3 to each, and 4 to 10 men. Therefore the least percentage is 10.

Not everyone’s cup of somnifacient
tea—but, as Carroll put it, “I believe that an hour of calculation is much better for me than half-an-hour of worry.”

I feel certain that Morton Dauwen Zabel would never have paid my father an extrasensory visit during the day, nor would Lewis Carroll have performed his amputations with such accuracy had he been operating when the rest of the world was awake. Owls think better at night. It is
true, however, that many people make mistakes when they stay up late. The
Exxon Valdez
ran aground at 12:04
A.M.
; the pesticide tank at Bhopal ruptured at 12:40
A.M.
; the Chernobyl reactor exploded at 1:23
A.M.
; the reactor at Three Mile Island spewed radiation at 3:53
A.M.
These accidents were all attributable to human error. But surely the errant humans were among the non-owl 90 percent: day
folk, maybe even dyed-in-the-wool larks, who had been forced by the exigencies of shift work to disobey the ticking of their circadian clocks. At Three Mile Island, the workers had just rotated to the night shift
that very day
and must have been as groggy as a planeful of New Yorkers disembarking in Kuala Lumpur.

It was therefore with a distinct sense of unease that I read
Night as Frontier
,
a book by a Boston University sociologist named Murray Melbin. Melbin believes that night, like the American West in the nineteenth century, is a territory to be colonized. We have run out of space, so
if we wish to increase our productivity and uncrowd our cities, the only dimension we have left to occupy is time: the hours after the normal workday. Many factories have already discovered that
it is cheaper to operate around the clock, even if wages are higher on the nonstandard shifts. If Melbin is right, those factory nightworkers— along with locksmiths, bartenders, bail bondsmen, twenty-four-hour gas-station attendants, police officers, paramedics, security guards, taxi drivers, talk-show hosts, and suicide hotline volunteers—are the advance wave of a vast nocturnal migration. There
are many parallels between night work and the settlement of the Western frontier: the pioneers tend to be young and nonconformist (the middle-aged are home watching Jay Leno); the population is sparse (owls tend to be mavericks); authority is decentralized (supervisors are asleep); life is informal (no coats and ties are required); there is hardship (fatigue, isolation, disruption of family routines)
and lawlessness (parking-lot muggings).

Melbin may be right. But in my view, if the night is like the Wild West,
let’s leave it that way
. If too many settlers start putting down stakes in the territory beyond midnight, California is going to happen. The wide open spaces will become the Los Angeles freeway system, and with too few owls behind the wheel, there will be accidents.

Because I savor
the illusion of having the small hours to myself, when I am in the city I prefer to spend them at
home. The noirish melancholy of the after-hours club and the all-night diner suits many owls, but I’d rather be in our bedroom, looking out the window every once in a while at the flocks of chic, black-garbed young couples, their laughter floating upward through the night, who cross the patch of lamplight
at Houston and West Broadway. Even if the city were safer, I doubt I would go for late walks. Dickens once had a period of insomnia during which he spent several nights walking the London streets between half past twelve and half past five: Haymarket, Newgate Prison, Bethlehem Hospital, Westminster Bridge, Covent Garden. He was searching for comfort but found only drunkards, thieves, rain,
shadows, silence, and scudding clouds “as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed.” The night he described in
The Uncommercial Traveller
is not the sable goddess of Edward Young or the bare-bosomed nurturer that Walt Whitman beseeched to press him close; it is more like the horrid place of “distempered gloom of thought / And deadly weariness of heart” that James Thomson visited in “The
City of Dreadful Night,” the most depressing of all nocturnal poems. For Dickens, as for me, the urban night was best enjoyed indoors, preferably with a book in hand.

“There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle,” wrote Charles Lamb.

We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam
come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight
taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.

I prefer a 150-watt halogen bulb, but I know just what he meant. Reading by day seems prosaic and businesslike,
the stuff of duty rather than of pleasure. When I was ten or twelve, I would close my schoolbooks without protest at bedtime, but after my mother left the room, I’d flip the switch of my bedside lamp and snatch a stolen hour (or two or three) of novel-reading, my heart beating wildly if I heard footsteps in the hall. Had my mother glimpsed the light under the door? She always had the grace to
pretend she hadn’t. Her steps would grow fainter, the book would grow shorter, and I would fall asleep at an ungodly hour, suffused with the goody-goody’s secret pride at having sinned.

The child who reads at night is likely to become the adult who writes at night. During the day, I pop out of my chair a dozen times an hour. The phone rings, the fax beeps, the mailbox needs to be checked, the
coffee needs to be brewed, the letter needs to be filed, the Post-its need to be rearranged—and possibly color-coded—
right this instant.
How can the writer’s distractive sirens be resisted? During a phase when his muse was particularly obdurate, John McPhee used to tie himself to his chair with his bathrobe sash. Schiller heightened his powers of concentration by inhaling the fumes from a cache
of rotten apples he kept in a drawer. All I need to do is stay up past midnight.