At Day's Close: Night in Times Past [Tapa blanda]

I first heard about this book from Fritz Lanham's marvelous review of it in the Houston Chronicle some weeks back. As usual, Lanham makes you curious and excited about the books he likes and, though he had some reservations about Ekirch's prose style and sometimes cumbrous way of writing, he still made the book sound great. I have to agree, AT DAY'S CLOSE is one of those books which, once finished, you can't stop thinking about and which you want to tell all your friends about. For anyone who has thought much about the world before the modern era, it has a particularly magical touch, for it asks us to re-imagine what life was like before the electric and gas light came to be, when once the sun fell people were plunged into mostly inpenetrable darkness. No wonder they made such a cult of the moon! It must have been a blessing to them. "Ill met by moonlight" indeed.

Ekirch reports that the ordinary householder spent more on his bed than on anything else in the house. People must have been confined pretty much to bed. It made me think of the way Shakespeare's will leaves his "second best bed" to his wife, a bequest biographers sometimes take to mean that they didn't have a very good marriage, but now that Ekirch's reportage is in, I think of it in a different way. In A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM, which takes place almost entirely during the night, the audience is allowed to "see" things it could never have seen even in moonlight and thus this must have contributed to the "magical" factor of the play for contemporary audience, a feeling we have long lost.

For us moderns, day and night are pretty much the same. Perhaps that's why our belief in elves, fairies, trolls, etc., has diminished. Thanks to Freud even our dreams have become more understandable. Imagine living back then and feeling that the dreams were part of a larger, evil force that took control once the sun was down and that dreams were forced on you!

The book has something startling on every page. How many other books can make that claim? Besides that, it brings the past to us in a nearly visceral way. I found myself looking at the sun, a-feared as I watched it near the earth.

What a great book, absorbing, thought-provoking and totally unputdownable. I have been waiting for so long to read this book and when I finally picked it up I just couldn't put it down. It is amazing. Culturally, we still have a fear of night, of the dark, and of what might happen. It is what makes horror movies so successful. Yet previous centuries, without the benefit of electric lighting, had a far deeper cultural attitude to day and night, and this is ably explained by Ekirch.

He explains just how pervasive night and dark was. Of people lost off dangerous roads, of streets hidden from daylight and moon light at night - and of falling into ditches, (or the kennels as they were then called) and having to chose the risk of falling into coal cellars on one side, or slipping into the kennels on the other. Of footpaths so ill formed that they were dangers in themselves. Of the distrust of anyone abroad at night, women not carrying candles were thought to be prostitutes and generally treated as thus. thefts at night were deemed burglaries and therefore viewed much more seriously than daylight thefts - indeed they were punishable by death.

The cultural icons of night were the devil, witches, werewolves and other nasty images, and in Italy they had a saying that dusk was when you couldn't tell a hound from a wolf. Interesting imagery.

The book suffers in some ways from not following a time line, or indeed a country, so quotes from the 14th century might easilyl follow a roman anecdote or something from 18th century England.

thematically it works though. It follows the general concepts of how night affected human psyche, of fires that were lit, and how they threw light. Of the types of lighting available, of curfews to prevent people being abroad. Of gradual municipal responsibility.

I found this book so good I read it through again to pick up what I missed the first time through. Truly extraodinary work and very enjoyable. My highest recommendation.

This book has done more to improve my understanding of pre-Enlightenment Western civilization, than, quite possibly, any one other work I can think of. The influence of the church on daily life, giving both fears (demons, Satan) and saviors - both of which were imminently more pressing when the only remedy for darkness was a candle whose poor light you could ill afford. (By the way, "burning the midnight oil" doesn't quite mean what you think it does.) The spread of disease, which was thought to be a result of the "bad night air", yet fear of it caused people to sleep, often all in one room, with the windows closed - thus practically ensuring that infection would spread to the whole family. One of the most surprising facts in the book is divided sleep, a phenomenon that the author maintains occurs in all primitive societies without electricity. People apparently become so well-rested that, going to bed near the fall of night, they have their "first sleep", awaken about midnight, lie awake (or find something to do) for 2-3 hours, then sleep some more. Ekrich points out that the body's hormones had completely adapted to this pattern. Thus, the aberration is our modern 6-8 hours at a stretch, something humans have not been doing that long really. This book is full of ideas like that. They are the kind of every day things that people think every one knows, so they are not written down, and, therefore, a bit of a challenge for the historian to unearth. (We all have these sort of "everybody knows that!" assumptions; just try coordinating a wedding. You'll soon find out both families have certain, largely unspoken, ideas of what a wedding should be.) Ekrich has written an enlightening book about a topic that has, amazingly, escaped scholarly light until now. A wonderful study of the dark half of our past.