CARPE NOCTEM

A man has written a book about the night. Well, why not? In the past decade or so, we’ve seen books on pencils, bookshelves, tobacco, cod, salt, spice, blood, bread, caffeine, crying, the penis, the breast, boredom, smiling, the hand, and masturbation. (Do the last six items seem to nudge one another?) Eventually, such books, and others like them, will all come to dust, including the two so far on dust itself, but before they do we might ask ourselves if this expenditure of print on the obvious and quotidian constitutes anything like a trend, or even a cultural shift.

These longish narratives, after all, deal with subjects that an English man of letters in 1820 might have devoted, at best, a dozen pages to. While grand abstractions (beauty, genius, the sublime) often produced long word counts, the smaller, more familiar aspects of life (vulgarity, idleness, getting up on cold mornings) were the domain of miniaturists like Lamb, Hazlitt, Stevenson, and, closer to our own day, Logan Pearsall Smith, or Cyril Connolly in one of his lighter moods. The thought that such matters required ventilating at book length would never have occurred to writers, much less publishers.

If it seems that any noun in the dictionary can be tricked out as a book these days, it’s because the minutiae of daily life have acquired some intellectual capital. Good microhistories do brisk business because they see the big picture in the smallest details, offering the hope that everything under the sun has meaning. So, whatever was formerly neglected, or looked at but not really seen—utensils, foodstuffs, or the hemp that was used to make the ladders that enabled enemies to scale the walls that housed a king—now demands the academy’s respect and scrutiny.

It follows, then, as the night the day, that the night should have its own day. In fact, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long. One reason for the delay may be that A. Roger Ekirch, who teaches Early American history at Virginia Tech, took twenty years to research and write “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” (Norton; $25.95). Ekirch, if the Notes at the back of the book are any indication, has consulted what look to be a thousand and one sources, many of which puncture Thomas Middleton’s elegant rendering of the night as fit for “no occupation but sleepe, feed, and fart.” For Ekirch, the night—even before public lighting, mass transportation, and the introduction of official police forces changed it forever—has been a hubbub of activity, a sequence of comings and goings, a bustling fiefdom with its own distinct customs and rituals...more here