From “Introduction”

When I was a girl, I couldn’t wait for night to fall. Darkness was delicious. It was a time for games of mystery and masquerade: hide-and-seek, statues, murder in the dark. The landscape moved in close, shapes shifted to silver, the air thickened with night scents, birds stopped their singing, and in the stillness, I heard my own heart. Years passed, and the night became a time for linked fingers and soft kisses. I looked up and saw the stars. Now I watch the full moon rising, wondering if the tomatoes need blanketing against frost. I tilt my head on a mid-August night and see the star-stones drop to Earth.

When it comes to the night, language is imprecise. Night doesn’t fall; not really. It rises, coming first to the indents in the landscape, the valleys and coulees, the notch below our house where a thin stream flows. Slowly, it ascends the riverbank, the hillsides, moving east to west, until all is darkness except the gold-tipped trees and a pale ruddy smear where the sun once was. Each cycle of light and dark is called a day—weeks and months are calculated as accumulations of days—yet night could just as easily be the measure. A year is 365 nights long, too. But it is not the night so much as the slide into darkness that arouses our linguistic imagination: sundown, twilight, dusk, the gloaming, evensong, vespers, crepuscule, blindman’s holiday, cockshut, owl-let, star-rush.

Historically, night was a time of shutting in, closing down. The night air was considered pestilent, malignant. Evil lurked. There is something atavistic about this terror of the night, a throwback to a time when predators, asleep by day, prowled the darkness. By the late 160 0s, John Locke was philosophizing that the almost universal childhood fear of the dark came from nannies telling ghost stories to wide-eyed youngsters. Almost a century later, Edmund Burke came closer to the truth. Darkness, he wrote in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is “terrible in its own nature.”

But there are other points of view. In This Cold Heaven (2001), Gretel Ehrlich recounts a Greenland myth in which the world exists in a darkness that admits no death. Before long, there are too many people. Two crones discuss the problem. One says, “Let us do without daylight if at the same time we can be without death,” but the other insists, “Nay . . . we will have both Light and Death.” This is an odd anomaly in a world where the darkness of night is equated with the absence of life— physical, intellectual, spiritual. The supposed retreat from civilization in the first millennium was called the Dark Ages. When Jane Jacobs wrote about the bleak future, she called her book Dark Age Ahead (2004).

Our fear of the dark, or at least the aspersions we cast on it, may be rooted in poor eyesight. As Wayne Grady points out in his essay “Nocturne” (2006), excerpted here, “We haven’t always been that way; far back in the evolutionary history of our species, we were nocturnal creatures. When we emerged from the night, we traded in night vision for color vision, and darkness has frightened us ever since.” As if to compensate for our stunted vision, other senses bloom at night. Sounds, in particular, are exaggerated. The mice that race across my bedroom ceiling sound like foxes; the howling coyote could be Cerberus himself. It is true what the Italians say: In the night, every cat is a leopard.

Before artificial illumination, those who wandered about at night were liable to trip over tree roots or fall headlong into open wells. In the city, as William Hogarth’s marvelous engraving Night (1738) attests, midnight strollers were at the mercy of broken pavement, wayward coaches, and showers of “night waste” from the rooms above. The French proverb still holds: Good people love the day; bad people, the night. Theft, arson, and more horrendous crimes take place under the cover of darkness, as Elie Wiesel makes clear in Night (19 6 0), a memoir of his nighttime arrival at the glowing chimneys of Auschwitz. At one time, soldiers waited until dawn to attack, but in the age of guerrilla warfare, as Tim O’Brien points out in “Night Life” (1990), battles are fought hand to hand in the dark.

Isaac Asimov, in his classic science fiction story “Nightfall” (1941), posited a world perpetually illuminated by six suns.

Once every two thousand years, a massive eclipse plunged the planet into a darkness that drove the populace mad. It’s not inconceivable. Even the momentary disappearance of our solitary sun is cause for unsettled wonder, as Annie Dillard illustrates in “Total Eclipse” (1982).

So great is our distrust of night that we’ve devised an electric six-sun equivalent that turns night bright as day, stripping it of superstition and silence, inhabiting it with both work and play. Of course, we’ve always worked at night. “Nightmen” emptied the cesspools after dark, which was when the grave diggers (and grave robbers) were out, especially during plagues. And the seasons have never been a respecter of sleep: when the time is ripe for sowing and harvesting, the fields beckon, just as the barn does when the ewe begins to lamb. I remember a summer night when we first moved to the country; I awoke to a low roar in the distance. Shafts of light swept the bedroom walls like intermittent searchlights. Aliens, I thought; but no, it was the farmer across the road, on his combine at midnight, hell-bent on bringing in the corn before the autumn rains fell.

Illuminating the night was never a universally popular move. In the early 1800s, Pope Gregory XVI forbade streetlamps in Rome, arguing that the citizenry would gather at night to foment rebellion. Artificial light was considered an interference in the divine plan for the world, which ordained darkness as much as light. Because the streets of the rich were lit first, outdoor lighting became a symbol of class and privilege: the streetlamps were the first to go after the storming of the Bastille. And now, again, the lighting of the night is in disfavor—a disruption to migrating birds, a drain on resources, a blight—as Timothy Ferris points out in “Beginnings” (2002), on the feral beauty of a deeply dark sky.

The stars, the moon, the whip-poor-will, fireflies, bats, and skunks: these essays introduce the peculiar landscape and inhabitants, the shape and smell and shadowy significance of that constant companion to human lives, the night.