Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion; and as for the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally. Why not walk a little way in her light?
Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in literature or religion?
Night and Moonlight, Thoreau
If there is one thing that I love about Thoreau (there are many) it’s his ability to draw our attention to those things in our daily life which go unnoticed and show us how remarkable they truly are. He is certainly known for his lusty braggings on the influences of the morning sun and dawn but his writings about the other half of the day are less known and appreciated. While perhaps less developed than his writings on the dawn, there is within them a gentle call—more whippoorwill and less chanticleer—to let your soft animal body and mind became more lunar and less solar.
The shadows of rocks and trees and shrubs and hills are more conspicuous than the objects themselves. The slightest irregularities in the ground are revealed by the shadows, and what the feet find comparatively smooth appears rough and diversified in consequence. For the same reason the whole landscape is more variegated and picturesque than by day. The smallest recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous; the ferns in the wood appear of tropical size. The sweet-fern and indigo in overgrown wood-paths wet you with dew up to your middle. The leaves of the shrub-oak are shining as if a liquid were flowing over them. The pools seen though the trees are as full of light as the sky. “The light of the day takes refuge in their bosoms,” as the Purana says of the ocean. All white objects are more remarkable than by day. A distant cliff looks like a phosphorescent space on a hill-side. The woods are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on. These small fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moon-seed,—as if the moon were sowing it in such places.
Night and Moonlight
On a backpacking trip several years ago I remember being awakened by what I thought was the morning sun shining brightly through my tent—bright enough to wake me up. Slightly disoriented, I peered outside and tried to determine what time it was, because it certainly didn’t seem like I had slept all night. Confused, I got out of the tent and walked out from under the tree cover. I discovered then that it wasn’t the sun but the full moon that woke me.
It was as if Thoreau’s famous last lines in Walden were inverted, like film negatives. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” What I thought was the sunrise turned out to be a moonrise. What dawned on me as I crawled out of my tent was not day but night.
Near the beginning of Walden he writes that, despite what the clocks tell us, “morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.” Would the corollary to that be that nightfall is when there is a dusk in me? And if we heed his advice about attending to the moon’s suggestions, nurturing the seeds she has sown, what shadowy fruits might grow when there is a dusk in me?
How insupportable would be the days, if the night, with its dews and darkness, did not come to restore the drooping world! As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect.
Night and Moonlight
If Walden is your only guide it’s understandable to assume Thoreau had a preference for the morning and its associations—metaphorical, moral, and literal. But perhaps it wasn’t so much that he preferred morning and daylight, but that it has a unique and particular function that he wanted to emphasize. In the above passage, however, he explicitly says that the day would be insupportable if the night didn’t restore the world, which indicates to me that he believes there is some crucial role the nighttime plays in the daily rhythm of dusk and dawn.
In 1851, Thoreau read chemist and mineralogist Robert Hunt’s book The Poetry of Science. In it, Hunt explains that Nicéphore Niépce, during his photographic* experiments, discovered a process Niépce called actinism.
[Niépce] experimented with exposure of silver plates to the less intense light of the moon and determined that moonlight affects objects differently than does sunlight. It doesn’t act on them directly, by burning them, as it were, but by “radiating” into them heat of low intensity. Once infused into the object this gentle radiation would rise to its surface, where it causes chemical changes that annul those generated by the sunlight; it would spread along the lines of the form inscribed by sunlight, to reconnect the molecules that had been separated, and in so doing blur and even erase the inscribed form.
Bird Relics, Branka Arsić (emphasis mine)
This process of repairing what was damaged, reversing the effects of sunlight at the molecular level, is what Niépce referred to as actinism.
It certainly seems like Thoreau was influenced by these ideas. Indeed, Arsić makes a strong case that Thoreau’s theory of grief is directly connected to his intuitions about actinism, specifically that, “nature recovers what is destroyed.” But reading these ideas by the light of the day may not be the best way to understand what he meant:
It must be allowed that the light of the moon, sufficient though it is for the pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we have, is very inferior in quality and intensity to that of the sun. But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, but also by her influence on the earth and its inhabitants.”The moon gravitates toward the earth, and the earth reciprocally toward the moon.” The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence. I will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts from the current distractions of the day. I would warn my hearers that they must not try my thoughts by a daylight standard, but endeavor to realize that I speak out of the night.
Night and Moonlight
*side note: Niépce was interested in the, “complex process designed to generate images that were simultaneously heliographic and actinic, registering not just the forms inscribed by sunbeams but also the way nocturnal darkness blurs them to restore matter that the day has damaged. He wanted both the ‘writing of the sun’ (heliography) and its erasure, trace and disappearance.” (quoted from Bird Relics)
That entire process is what he named photography.