The night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness
I learned the language of another world.
- BYRON
I don’t suppose I’m the only one that thinks this – that as I’m wandering back to my room after a long night of study, and my eyes stray casually to the sky, and there are all the stars, that I think I’ve been rather unfair to night. It’s the same as when you decide to sleep outside for some strange reason (because actual sleep is hard to come by in those situations) and forget the rugged wildness of the night sky. As a child I felt afraid of the dark, though it wasn’t really the dark I was afraid of. It was this great big terrible sense of the unknown. How could I be sure, as I would dash up the stairs late at night with nothing but a dark void behind, that some monster or raving lunatic wasn’t pursuing me? Why would I insist on igniting a chain of lights throughout the house as I went to bed, moving from light switch to light switch, terrified of crossing through even the briefest space of darkness?
All this to say that I’ve grown up with a sort of resistance to the night, when actually it is a thing of its own special beauty. Edward Young wrote that by night an atheist half believes in God. According to the psalmist, the heavens declare the handiworks of the Lord. It is in the dead of night, as we are granted a glimpse of the far field of heaven above, that it becomes so clear, in an almost childish way, that God is real and He is ruler.
So of course I had to propose this question to a friend of mine: will there be night in Heaven? He didn’t seem to think so, the most obvious reason being that the Light of God would bathe all things in radiance, and never would we dwell in the sort of obscurity night provides, that great absence of light. And here is my pondering, that if we can truly say there is Beauty to be seen and appreciated in night - in the ethereal otherworldliness of moonlight, the awesome infinitude of starlight, even the strange and wonderful fading of things into dusk – then is that simply a temporal pleasure God has provided us with on Earth, and never intended to last beyond our death? Is night simply a celestial complication, a mere consequence of our planet’s rotation? I believe with God there are no coincidences, that He could have simply created our planet stationary, with no need to turn itself or turn its path about the sun. But then – we wouldn’t get to experience the night. Or maybe the fact that half our lives are spent in darkness forces us to appreciate the clarity and beauty of the day, of the sun, of the light that makes all Nature known to us, unobscured and beautiful. Think about it.
