The Book of Nocturnes

What sort of book is a philosophical investigation into the meaning of the night? It can only be a paradox, or better still, a riddle. While there are indeed night books, the book itself is fundamentally a day object. Bound in language and constrained by concepts, books and their readers demand an intelligibility that can be subjected to the logic of artifice, the logic of day. If the night, and night-thinking, are to be grasped in language, it must be of a different kind, that of the mythical narrative, the eikos mythos. Art, religion, and imaginative story are the oblique paths that lead us into the night. A path is an established connection between one place and another. It always leads to a destination. But if we fix our eyes on the destination, we have abandoned the kind of thinking necessary for the night; to see that far, our eyes must be adjusted to day. As wanderers in the night, we might focus on the path itself, forgetting our point of origin and ignoring our destination. In order to be properly adjusted to our ambitions, writing, the use of language that is always subjected to reasons, must break off before a destination comes into view. Hence our mythical stories will have to be told as fragments.