One of my favorite words in the entire English language is nightlife. Maybe you think that is a bland choice. Maybe you would have expected something more dramatic, like illustrious or more tortured, like insatiable. Those are good words too, but nightlife, if you take a moment to really look it over, is a term loaded with implications of modernity and human achievement.
It was relatively recently that life, as far as human beings were concerned, ended at sundown. Life was restricted to the daylight hours. The time for living followed the sun. It told you to rise in the morning and retreat come dusk.
In many parts of the world life is still constrained in this way. But in the parts of the world that I had had the good fortune of living in—the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, most recently, Rome—the setting of the sun meant less the ending of the day, and more the birth of an entirely separate world.
In major metropolises across the globe, people have achieved control over what was once considered unmanageable on a scale larger than a campfire or row of torches—people have achieved control over light. Today we have windowless casinos where time seems to never move, and we have cities that never sleep. We have harnessed electrical energy and spread it through infinite webs of wiring to lift our four-star hotel elevators and light our expansive and exhaustive networks of roadside streetlamps. We can power masses of audio speakers, which reproduce digitally recorded music played on electric turntables in chic lounges, where people drink and dance and socialize, most oblivious to it all—to the progressive development that went into creating a whole other life for civilized man.
It is a life of neon lights and guest lists, velvet ropes, and colorful cocktails in exquisitely shaped glasses, men and women dressed in the height of fashion who have spent hours preparing themselves to exit from the life of the norm—of the daylight—and enter a second, new life, of the night. It is a life that is an extremely modern phenomenon and one which celebrates human invention and creation. It is the defeat of the darkness, victory over the black. The recapturing of time stolen—time previously rendered useless and reserved for creatures nocturnal. It is an entire world that exists beyond the constraints of the sun. A world that should not be. A second life apart from that which was conceived naturally. A night life.
I liked the word nightlife. I liked the concept. Time repossessed. Defiance of the natural order. But the night is far more than a mere extension of the day. The night is another world. And the energy of this other world—of this night life—is something in itself a bit darker, a bit shadier, a bit more suspicious and mysterious. Even if you do not frequent the see-and-be-seens, even if you do not happen to live in one of the world’s major urban capitals, even if your normal bedtime is quarter past nine after a rented DVD you watched with your two cats, you too have felt the effects, the power, the influence of the night.
Why is it that so many first kisses happen after dark? Is it simple probability? Simply a statistical fact that you go out to Chinese dinner or to the latest Hugh Grant import flick—for her sake, of course—around dusk, and it just so happens to be dark by the time you are back at the front steps of her parents’ house, or are on your third round of liquid courage at the local Irish pub, or are sitting parked in your nineteen-eighties Toyota Camry, the engine off, light jazz trickling from the three functional speakers, the two of you staring anxiously into each other’s eyes instead of the beautiful view of the stars above or ocean below or city ahead in the distance? Is it simply that people have to work during the day and therefore only get to the tantalizing and passionate and tempting at a later hour? Or is it something more?
I remember the period of life when sleepovers at your friends’ houses were a weekly event. It must have been around middle school—sixth to eighth grade, or so. Before that time, there was the stage in elementary school when you were too young to conceptualize such an idea and playtime was cut off well before nine o’clock. There was also the period of high school afterwards, when you outgrew sleepovers at your same-sex friend’s houses—that concept now considered strange and emasculating—and you instead snuck around your neighborhood trying to have scandalous and secretive late-night encounters at a girlfriend’s house, which were achieved by elaborate window escapes and bed stuffing—stunts which were, in retrospect, so obvious and contrived that you must thank your parents for playing along so well with your missions impossible.
But that period there in the middle, sixth to eighth grade or so, where you would call home after delivered pizza and ask if you could spend the night at Charlie Marshall’s and Mom would ask to talk to Mr. Marshall and he would confirm it was a welcome idea and you would set up a pair of sleeping bags in the living room and switch off the overhead lights and just lie there with your best friend—those are some of the most revealing and intimate memories I have from childhood.
Opinions, judgments, beliefs, embarrassments—regarding everything from siblings to girls at school to puberty to sex to the very relationship with the person with whom you were conversing—they just came flowing freely from our consciousness to our tongues as we laid there in the faint illumination of the room’s modest nightlight. Why was none of this ever discussed during the day? Why was it so easy to get these ideas to snowball lying there on the floor in the darkness? Why in the world would we get up the next morning and never discuss some of the issues—really relevant stuff—until the next sleepover or sometimes never discuss it ever again?
Now we are older, more self-conscious, and do more self-editing. But the night still pulls at our subconscious, our subliminal, our secrets dying to get out. Why do candlelit dinners bring people closer together—make them feel as if they are the only ones in existence at that particular place and time? There is something that happens to us when we refuse to exit consciousness and instead push onwards, alive, awake, led by the artificial and man-made long after the sky has extinguished, the horizon faded to black, and the world shrunken to that of the diameter of light thrown from the nearest lamppost, or wax candle, or living-room nightlight.
--excerpt from http://www.midnightinrome.com
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