The nature of daylight and nighttime

January 25th, 2024

Daylight is a given. Only noticed when it becomes shorter, and then again when it starts to stretch into the afternoon hours. Even when overcast and gray, it is needed for mine (and by a clear extension) for all human existence in its appearance of just a few hours in a day. I heard that it is possible to live in places where there are times when there is no daylight at all for a part of a season. I don’t believe it. To subject yourself to such torture, and to do it willingly, is absurd. And it is doubtful that people who live without daylight, even for a short time a year, are any more fully human. It is not possible to remain a wholly normal and conscious person when looking up brings only a dark abyss to the eyes.

Nighttime is terrifying. Especially when the realization of its two natures comes to mind. Nighttime, unlike daylight, which uniformly is positive, has two separate feelings about it. One is sinister in its appearance and inviting to take a wrong turn, especially since no one will see. That darkness is a creeping matter ready to annihilate. The other is a fundamentally unknowable darkness of Orphic theology in which there is nothing to annihilate. And there never was anything to annihilate in the first place, because darkness is primordial and everything that ever was is and was and will be no more than just an illusion of the flicker of a candle on a distant horizon.

Darkness is the natural state of being, daylight is artificial — and thus we, as artificial creations already outside of nature, crave it so much.