the end of night

[corvi]

Tonight is the last time it will be officially night here until June
29th. There will be twilight, when the sun is below the horizon and
not visible, but it will still light up parts of the atmosphere we can
see. Long slowly darkening green-blue twilights, like the lasting
resonance of a bell. In the small hours of the morning, the twilight
will have faded to a faint whisper of grey on the distant horizon. But
there will be no night.

There are sometimes strange clouds. Noctilucent clouds: wisps of water
vapor coalescing around smoke left at the top of the atmosphere by
meteors. They are so high up the sun is never below the horizon for
them, so they are lit up like daylight. Insubstantial blue wisps
shining in the twilight sky.

Last year I did fine, but this year the nightless hours are kicking my
butt. The house is perched atop a random lump of rock on the side of a
mountain, and there is nightless sky in every direction. (Even our
closets have windows. Who builds a house and puts windows in the
closet?) I am not sleeping well, and my dreams are strange. Exhausted
during the day. Been staring blankly at my work a bit more than I’d
like, though I think this particular project would be confusing even
if I was well rested.

Something in me aches for the safe return of night. And still: it is a
lovely luminous blue-green sky, like a bell whose ring does not fade.

Comments

[maellenkleth]

Living and working up north, one marvels at the endless days of mid-summer. I have a sharp memory of standing in the working-basker atop a drilling-rig, at 0100 local time, and having every part of the landscape and the drill-rig painted bright red by the near-horizon Sun.

It is rather hard to get enough sleep this time of year.

[sistawendy]

I think I'd go mad. Even down here, I put black foam board in my bedroom window to make it dark enough to sleep. And then I put a leather mask on, as sort of a reverse pervertible.

[m_cobweb]

Ah, beautiful, even if not what you'd prefer.

[jkatkina]

There's something kind of existentially terrifying about the way you describe this.

Fortitude: night will come. How do you find the long nights on the other end?

[corvi]

> Fortitude: night will come.
I like your poetic phrasing here. It sticks in the head, like a tiny talisman.

> How do you find the long nights on the other end?
The long nights are depressing, but less unsettling. I live on Salt Spring Island and commute to Victoria for work via ferry, so when the days are shortest, I feed the chickens in the dark while they sleepily complain from their roosts, and drive down from the mountain in the dark, and cross the ocean in the dark, and only the city has light - by the time I return home to my island and the mountain and the forest it will be dark again. Not being able to actually ever see the sea or home or the animals is depressing. There's little farm work in winter, which is convenient given the lack of daylight to do it in, but contributes to feeling rootless.

But it's not surreal and existentially weird in the same way. And there are sanity-restoring weekends, so as much as I might mope around about forgetting what home looks like, that's just melodrama, I'm not actually in danger of any such thing. :)

[ivy]

Thanks for sharing this bit of evocation about the hindbrain-unexpected things our planet does. It has a little bit of the "whoa this is NOT NORMAL" feeling of the total eclipse to me, where if one hasn't been through it before, there's a question as to whether this is a reversing process or not in the back of one's mind. But it sounds like even if one has been through it before, it's still perturbing.

[yam]

When juli posted about the approaching not-night-ness, I thought in surprise "Oh! I didn't know Salt Spring was north of me," which of course it isn't. I wonder if my idea of what night is is just different from what a hypothetical Brooke born a few states south of here would think - I notice the days getting longer, but June nights seem as nightly to my sensibility as any other. It's like learning that russian has different words for blue and light blue; picking out which blue word I need takes me aback a bit every time.

[maellenkleth]

Finnish has those two words, too.

[corvi]

Mongolian too: хөх (dark blue) and цэнхэр (light blue).

A cloudless sky is хөх. I guess I've seen a few skies that I'd consider a dark blue, but I would not consider it the standard descriptor. Which one, if either, is the sky colour in Finnish?

[corvi]

Hm. I lived pretty far south for a lot of my childhood, so maybe that's it. Or maybe the effect is more pronounced in our rural-ish setting. The long twilight that throws me off might just be normal "large city at night" levels of light, as complained about by someone who isn't used to it. (But with occasional weird glowing clouds).

[dorchadas]

That sounds utterly amazing to me, but of course I don't have to sleep in it...

[maribou]

I am indeed the sort of person who would put windows in closets, though I wouldn't in *yours*.

I hope having a house full of people laughing and being fond will turn out to have been a help/blessing/easement, and that you'll be released from the spell of the long lumens soon.

[twoeleven]

Some of a late hit: NASA has a view from above the things that go shine in the night.