A sweater feels good. For most of us, night is a mysterious pause when our conscious lives are temporarily suspended. We go to sleep and wake the following day, aware there has been a gap in experience, an intervening period when we were absent from the world, that time has somehow stopped. Reality is daytime or its simulation. But this is a mistaken sense, educed from being creatures of the light.
Reality is quite different, of course.
Time is continuous, not interrupted. Nevertheless, what we see as the shutting-down of day and its resumption at the other end of night are interpreted as signals to alter our behavior, to prepare for something different in inherited recollection of a distant creature past. This is the rhythm that orders our lives. The cadenced pulse of this spinning globe underlies our pendulating concept of day and night, of pleasure and fear, adventure and seclusion, of the very nature of thought processes within a regulated twenty-four hour cycle. We speak in terms of black and white, rarely in shades.