Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Changing Perspectives 2 - Night and Day



This is the second installment of my little “Changing Perspectives” series.  If you read the first post, you know that I talked a little bit about common connotations of the words “black” and “white”, and how those connotations might be harmful.  The topic for this post, “Night and Day” (mainly focusing on the “Night” part), certainly sounds very similar, but, while I think its starting place has parallels with the previous post, it ends up moving off in quite a different direction…

            Now it is the time of night
            That the graves, all gaping wide,
            Every one lets forth its sprite,
            In the church-way paths to glide

                                                 - Robin Goodfellow (aka Puck)
   A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare

I counsel you by way of caution to forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.

 - Sir Hugo Baskerville, in a letter to his sons
   from The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I had an interesting relationship with the night when I was a little kid.  I remember trying, however I could, to figure out ways of pushing back the inevitable end of each day known as “bedtime”.  To this day, I continue to stay awake deep into the night (and the early hours of the morning).  But, I remember a few instances during my early years when I was seriously afraid of the dark, afraid of being alone in my bedroom, afraid to close my eyes.  This usually occurred after watching a particularly scary movie (for example, when I was very young, I’m pretty sure I thought Ghostbusters II was really creepy – only years later did I realize that it’s supposed to be funny, when I started actually listening to the dialog and not focusing all my attention on that creepy picture of a very angry-looking medieval guy).  Anyway, during those times, I remember buying into the whole idea that night was the realm of scary things, of demons, goblins, ghosts, and gremlins, and that the morning sun would send all of these evil beasts running for cover and wash away our fears.

Why does the night get this less-than-savory reputation?  Why are the powers of evil supposedly exalted during these dark hours?  My guess is that it has something to do with our difficulty seeing at night.  Without that huge light bulb shining above in the sky, our vision becomes pretty limited.  Even on clear nights, with a full moon, we lose quite a bit of the depth of that particular sense.  The myriad colors of our waking world fade into varying shades of gray, and objects that would be simple to identify during daylight can appear distorted, and potentially ominous.  Perhaps the night brings to light a subtle fear of the unknown.  “I’m not completely sure what that tall, dark object is over there, and I have to say that I’m a little afraid of it.  Perhaps it’s just a tree, swaying in the breeze, or perhaps it’s something a bit more sinister…”  We’re not sure what’s out there, what’s coming, what’s up ahead, and that uncertainty can be a little frightening.

And yet, for the most part, I experience the night as something beautifully different than the day, as something that feels almost magical.  Indeed, literature does not only highlight the seemingly evil aspects of the evening.  Some works are much more balanced in their portrayal of the magic that takes place in the darkness.  Take those poetic lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which began this post.  The lines that immediately follow put different magical creatures on display, ones who are a bit more benevolent (although, if you know the play, they also enjoy jokes at others’ expense from time to time…)

            And we fairies, that do run
            By the triple Hecate’s team
            From the presence of the sun,
            Following darkness like a dream,
            Now are frolic; not a mouse
            Shall disturb this hallow’d house

When I say that night is almost magical, it’s important to know that I’m not referring to the nightlife one might experience in a big city.  I’m talking about night out in the country, when the world goes to sleep, when I feel the cool, refreshing evening breeze blowing across my face and through the leaves on nearby trees, when I hear the ensemble of insects and other night-time creatures serenading the darkness, when I smell the grass beneath my feet, the grass that, perhaps, seems a bit more welcoming at this hour, when the sun is gone and the warmth of another life is close at hand.  (Admittedly, it’s probably much easier to enjoy the night and feel its beauty when one lives in a place where every night throughout the year is basically a midsummer night.)  It’s true that our sense of sight is hindered during these hours, but our other senses can become heightened as we accept that fact.  The past few nights, I have sat on the floor in silence, with my eyes closed, and have marveled at the music all around me, music that often goes unnoticed when other thoughts, and other sights, are flying through my mind.

But our sight is not completely gone.  Perhaps the most beautiful part of the night, for me, is the starry sky above.  I also like looking at the moon, but sometimes I prefer the nights when the moon does not make an appearance, when the only lights in the sky are those distant suns, burning billions of miles away.  Some nights in Kalisizo, especially when the power is off, I can look up in the sky and see, in between the bright stars that I recognize, faint ones that I never even knew existed.  This little experience reminds me that, beyond these visible lights, there are millions more out there somewhere in the vast expanse.  Stars lead us to remember the grandeur of the universe, and they help us to recognize that this place we occupy is only an incredibly small corner of an infinitely larger existence.  Stars might even suggest to us our own seeming insignificance in this great cosmic reality, and yet, they might also help us to realize our potential to be more than what we are.

When I stand outside and lift my eyes to the sky, I feel, and I would guess that many of us feel, drawn to the stars.  For some of us, that draw might be related to scientific exploration and discovery, and, for some of us, it might be related to philosophical contemplation.  In any case, I think it always connects to an innate desire to know more about ourselves, to learn more about our place in the universe, and perhaps it even relates to an existential connection with the stars themselves.  In other words, by knowing more about those stars and what they are, we might be able to learn something about ourselves.

Several people have made the point that we are more closely related to stars than we might at first think.  If we look at the sun, and then look at a person, it’s pretty easy to tell that they are very different things, right?  Well, if we look at it from a different perspective, we find that we can actually trace our origins back to the stars.  (Don’t worry, I’m not about to go off into one of those theories about aliens coming to Earth and “planting” us here.)  Here’s a short excerpt from a book called The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, by Thom Hartmann:

“This is where all the matter of our world (except hydrogen) came from: it was created in the heart of a star.  Not only that, the star had to die for those elements to reach us.”

The point Hartmann makes is that, early on in the life of the universe, we basically had a lot of subatomic particles, which eventually combined into hydrogen atoms.  Those atoms of hydrogen came together, as a result of gravity, to form clouds that eventually collapsed into stars, which are fueled by nuclear fusion.  Nuclear fusion reactions are ones in which smaller atoms (hydrogen) fuse together to create larger atoms (helium).  This type of reaction gives off a ton of energy, which is why the sun is so hot and can supply the earth with so much radiant energy.  Anyway, as stars age, larger and larger atoms are formed (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, iron, etc…), and, when a star finally dies, those various elements shoot out to find a new home.  In other words, the building blocks of all life on this planet were born in some distant star, long ago and far away.

So, in the middle of the night, we look up to those stars, and we feel a connection.  We feel that there is more to us, and more to the universe around us, than we can see with our eyes, and we search for that thing which we feel but cannot yet pinpoint.

            We are stardust, we are golden,
            And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden

                                                Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”

I’m planning to go a little deeper into this whole idea of our connection to the stars in my next post.  Tune in next time…

P.S. – In fairness to other viewpoints on the concept of us as stardust, I will say that, in an episode of The West Wing, a NASA scientist is explaining the origin of the elements that make us up and comments, “I guess Joni Mitchell was right.  We are stardust,” to which Josh Lyman replies, “Or, put another way, nuclear waste.”

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