on night owls & the nocturnal 

I994 CLEMENT, Catherine 

Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture

From "The Owl and the nightingale: Hegel and Holderlin" 

The philosopher, however, is a strange bird. During the day, while others work and live, God alone knows what the philosopher is doing: he dreams, he faints, perhaps he sleeps...One never knows. But when his peers go off to bed, the philosopher, like a methodical depressive, a true register of anguish, opens his eyes and starts to keep watch

I994 CLEMENT, Catherine

Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture

From "The Owl and the nightingale: Hegel and Holderlin" 

The philosopher, alas, will always keep watch too late. Any co-incidence with any event whatsoever is impossible: or rather, unthinkable. Thought cannot be anything but twilight; it is at nightfall that their eyes open, to watch, fixedly, what still remains hazy in the gray shadows

2012 SCHULZ, Kathryn, 

Writing in the Dark

"I sometimes think I would give anything to be a morning person—one of those writers who wakes naturally at six, does an honest day’s work by noon, and is free to socialize all evening. As such a person, I could, for once, see the sun rise from the right side of the day. I could enjoy the moral kudos showered on the ostensibly hardworking and virtuous lark and withheld, across all cultures, from my own kind. Roenneberg captures the common sentiment thusly: “Owls are at best, extroverted artists and intellectuals, or at worst, people who engage in dark arts and exert evil powers.”

2012 SCHULZ, Kathryn, 

Writing in the Dark

"The truth is, I love the dark arts, or anyway, the arts in the dark. I love the quiet and the solitude; love, especially, nighttime’s strange combination of adventure and calm. Once an hour or so I’ll step outside to look at the stars, to let them turn my mind like a kaleidoscope, like a key in the tumblers of a lock. It makes me elated; it makes me, at the same time, somber. The seventeenth-century Anglican minister Anthony Horneck put it well: “Now is the soul nimbler, subtler, quicker, fitter to behold things sublime and great.” He was speaking of midnight prayers, but tell me what writer doesn’t crave exactly that: to be nimbler, subtler, quicker, fitter to beholdcreation—fitter to create.

2012 SCHULZ, Kathryn, 

Writing in the Dark

"The universe is dark. Before Copernicus, the cosmos was presumed to be awash in infinite, celestial light. Look at the brilliant blues on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Renaissance painting lagged behind Renaissance astronomy), or read Dante, who declared that beyond the spheres of the planets lay the “Luminous Heaven.”

With the shattering of geocentrism came the realization that we do not look through night’s darkness into infinite day, but through daylight into infinite darkness. Understood this way, it is at night, not by day, that we most truly see the world as it is. We humans have drawn an unlikely hand: We are creatures with photosensitive eyes, on a planet that can sustain life, in rotation around a dazzling sun. Outside our own wildly improbable coordinates, the rest, to paraphrase Hamlet, is darkness"

DE MAUPASSSANT, Guy

“I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space. ”