The day is for action, the night for thought. All day long we move from place to place, sentence to sentence, thought to thought, person to person; the pace of life is unrelenting in activity and motion. I say so many words per day, it is nearly impossible to estimate. I spoke with no less than fifty people today. Sometimes I may start to ponder something, “Why did he say that? It makes no sense, I think that …” – but suddenly someone is talking to me and I lose my train of thought, and there is no conlcusion. There is a buzz of life in the air, a foreign whisper of a feeling beneath my skin saying, “I am living, and these are people, and during the day I interact with them, and that is what a Day is, and a Day happens everyday.” My brain must act quickly; time is pressing, people are wanting, the scenery is changing. Even at my house, one moment is never like the one before it. When driving I see so many faces in the other cars, and on the sidewalk, and in the stores. I see them on the television, and on my computer screen. I see them in the newspaper, and I hear their voices on the radio. They all have stories, and they are living life just like I am. How loud they make it! “It’s the world I’m in: a loud place with many voices, a raucous place filled with a discordant species called humans, of which I am one. And I’m just trying to play a part.”
The day is loud, the night is quiet. Slaves to their own physiology, humans decline in vitality until they succumb to sleep, and most crave to do so, somehow thinking they will attain pleasure during an activity in which they are not conscious. The star hides, the day closes up shop. Suddenly there is stillness, a silence that seems impossible during the day. Who knew that even one portion of such an enormous and populated planet could decline to such inactivity? What the unceasing day did not allow I now how freedom to do: breathe, think, question, focus. The quiet voice of our subconscious speaking to us during the day is now audible; the night reveals the day’s realities, what we actually think about things. All day we saw one star, now we see many: the day sky was merely a mask to their now obvious existence. So it is the same with many other things that the day hides that we realize at night.
Time almost seems not to exist or apply at night: I no longer check my watch, or think of where I am going next. I sit in a chair and simply am. My solitary position prompts me to think of the end of time, when I will be one soul, stripped to the core and revealed for my true existence. The night brings honesty. In seventh grade I thought of something, and I still think it, to an extent, “All humans are nutcases on the edge, some just hide it more than others.” To this point I am driven many nights, not acting in accordance with any standard of societal, religious, or philosophical decorum, but really letting lose in stream of uncensored thought, wondering about this madness the we are subjected to. Even if your life is currently undramatic or uneventful you are still living as a human, which gives you the potential to experience anything a human has exeperienced. Therefore, when thinking about what existence is all about it is not simply our own state we should consider, but the worst possible set of feelings and events. For as we dive into the depth of feelings and what is possible, we find more and more reality to discuss, and the conversation continues with a proper realization of the extremity of the situation.
The day is blurry, the night is clear. That is why the ideas I investigate I do so at night; so I can think through ideas with clear reasoning, and not when I am susceptible to distraction. I don’t write about those things here though, for before debating others, one must debate themself. Not to mention, a fruitful debate is very nearly an oxymoron. Regardless, night is the domain of ideas to me. It’s where they live, breathe, thrive, and, on occasion, die. And how many ideas are there! How vast are the realms of the unconsidered! The internet is the dramatic aggregation of human thought throughout history, all synthesized into one easily manipulated system. It has expanded the potential scope of thought from the few books we have and our own thoughts to wherever google or wikipedia lead us. Night serves as the structure to examine these ideas, these thoughts, these endless considerations. Thus, when everything fades down low, and my mind is emphasized, my range of thought stretches from thinking about everything to simply myself. Life would be unrealized without the rumination night allows, and as Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And since life drips with drama and trouble, there are always thoughts to shock ourselves with. Oh, the anticipation, the expectation, the thrill! Life! Imagination! Oh, how ridiculous this all is! I have not settled down into existence. I refuse to. Nonconformity beckons my will, that what I am may not just be my a product of my circumstances, that my defintions may not coincidentally be identical to those of my culture and society, that my brain can stretch past what I have been taught, that everything that is assumed to be turns out to be wrong. When I am revived from thought, let it be that what I imagined and thought is impossible to express through any common medium such as movie, book, or song, but that it remains a reminder when speaking to someone that nothing has to be, and perhaps nothing is as it seems. This is the night, more specifically the internet at night, where we may properly and fully delve into the marvels of the mind, and, if we’re lucky, we might just hit a stroke of thought.
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