Night

THE campfire had died down to a bed of waning coals. Overhead, the sky was moonless and without a cloud. The trees were about me, and darkly mysterious in the mountain night. The ravine where I had camped was quiet and slumberous, and neither nightbird nor coyote called through the silence. It seemed as if I alone of all the animals of the universe were sleepless and sentient in the night. Yet it was a peaceful insomnia which possessed me; it could be nothing else with the great suns and unfathomed reaches of stars above me, with the night and the trees for my shield and cloak, and the eye of the fire to keep me company. All that day I had been dreaming dreams and planning the future, and, what with my long tramp over the mountains and my continuous exalted mood of hope and unreasoned satisfaction, when I came to roll myself in my blankets by the fire I found myself sleepless and eager. My mind would not cease its activity, my nerves were highstrung and taut, and my heart beat passionately. Nor could I compose myself to rest, struggle as I would. The longer I lay, the more wakeful and energetic grew my mind, and Sleep, the benign goddess, was unconquerable and distant.

Sleeplessness, too, as well as Sleep, is to be courted, and welcomed when she comes in gentle guise. But too often she is terrible and Medusa-crowned, one of the unseen Eumenides, more feared than Morpheus or any old deity of nightmare and unconsciousness. Night after night, week after week, I have lain with wide eyes, staring deep into the void dark, my body composed and still only by a constant muscular effort, while the curse of insomnia dragged on my nerves. Through the chained hours I would brood upon the evenings of childhood, when, healthily tired, thoughtless, contented, I would be put to bed at dusk and on the instant vanish, and appear again in the morning, so that for many years night and darkness were hardly even names to me, and their sensations were altogether unknown. But with insomnia came bitter knowledge, made all the more unhappy by a clear, even a vivid, recollection of childish peace and ignorance. I have experienced nightmares the most harrowing, but there can be no nightmare whose terror equals the terror of prolonged insomnia. Oh, the waking dreams and the memories, the illusions, fears, morbidities, the quickchanging black thoughts and fancies, the helpless waitings and tossings,— the utterly helpless waitings and tossings, — the myriad, Janus-faced elves and gnomes of the night, that dance on our pillows! The long, snail-crawling, almost eternal moments! And, through the days, weakness, lassitude, a drowsiness verging on elusive sleep, but starting awake at a nod; and the mingled hope and fear for the coming night! The Chinese torture of dripping water is no more tormenting than this torture of insomnia. Yet one must know the disease even faintly to realize the great boons of sleep and coma and non-existence.

Horrid and Gorgonian, snake-locked indeed, is the goddess Insomnia; but there is also another deity of Sleeplessness, gentle-faced and tender and full of wisdom and rest. How variant she from her torturing sister! To be awake and contented, watchful, hearkening, filled with peace and quietude, in the still, calm, everlasting night of space! There is neither disease nor hardship in this; rather it is a thoughtful pause on our life’s journey, a contemplative night snatched from hurrying existence, a rest by the way. Life flares, a fiery comet, and shortly whirls out. In the rush and roar and combustion, rare intervals of midnight wakefulness fall as benedictions indeed, for only then we have time to ourselves, time to stop and breathe and look about us and contemplate the eternity through which we are for a moment hurrying. In the daylight we belong to the world; sleep snatches us from and restores us to it. Our feet shuffle the pavements of life with what pleasures and agonies, — but always hurriedly, feverishly, as if the pursuing moment were armed to strike us down, — while we weave in and out through crowded humanity. This is the buzz and swarm and agitation of the gnat-cloud, hovering and dancing above a summer pond. But night is the pond itself, whence the darting and the turmoil breed and emerge and vanish again; always hushed, brooding, creative, always calm and dead under the flutter of life.

Night was a cathedral of rest, where I lay museful and sleepless. A cathedral built of the canopied stars and the stretched skies, of far-towering rockribbed walls of mountain, and aisles and long reaches of pines hidden in darkness, with an incense-laden air, drowsed by green perfumes, and at my feet the altar-eye with its pillared smoke. I threw off my blankets and put new logs on the dying fire; and in a moment an infantile tongue of flame licked up the rough bark, and fell, and struck again like a snake. Underneath the heavy dead wood, the bed of ashes glowed ruddier, and trembling sparks trooped through it. A log snapped, the red flames leaped suddenly under a fusillade of reports, and hot sparks flew upward in a starry stream. About me the dusky night sharply shut, and grew black and closely environing, while a circle of flaring light pushed it back and held it, and built for me there in the heart of the darkness a walled cavern. Last, the pitch-pine stump that I had laid upon the logs caught and hissed and glared, and a white flaring light filled my unsubstantial realm and made of the walls of darkness sable hangings bellying and blowing about me.

This was my fire-built chapel in the cathedral of night, where I might muse, and by wordless emotion communicate with the gods. Here I might rest by the way. With the others of my kind, — with the flies, and the swallows and the human men, — I too had been hurrying I knew not where, feverishly fluttering and darting down the high-road, intent on doing something, on gaining somewhat, on achieving some unknown, upon reaching the yawning goal. I had had no time to look about me, no time to pause on the road, no time to stray away over the green slopes and gather pleasures, no time for anything but death. I had been hurrying down the way in anticipatory eagerness. I could not bear to stop in the pleasant pavilions of night until now, when favoring Sleeplessness brought me to the chapel by the way, — to the caravansérai of darkness, the pilgrim-house of monastic night, — and I looked about me at the strange world that I had before never found time to view. So I saw for once the beautiful land of Faerie, through which the white, dust-laden road runs to my tomb. But here I could rest, for was not this, in very truth, the felicity to which I was hurrying?

This peaceful, dead, thoughtless, and majestic Night is the goal of men and planets and suns and universes, and all are hurrying thither pell-mell, crowding and racing and eager to be received into darkness. This is the Alpha and Omega, the mother and the tomb. It was to this alone that I had been so strenuously tramping, and to which, whether I would or not, I must yet journey. And, sitting there in the sleepless silence, the goal seemed for the moment very desirable, and filled with an unimaginable felicitous peace. The drear burden of personality, the agony of life and of memory, here they will wither into darkness, I dreamed, and into the supreme happiness of Nirvana. In that hour, alone in the mountains, I fancied that I tasted an anticipatory draught of the nectar of death, I dreamed that I rested for a prophetic moment in the soul of the infinite, and, drunk with night, I found the haven inexpressibly desirable.