Christopher Dewdney: Acquainted With The Night: Excursions Through The World After Dark
Christopher Dewdney makes his living as a poet and professor, but he's also a walking, talking, writing argument for a good liberal-arts education. Judging by his books, Dewdney would make a splendid dinner companion, capable of conversing on just about any topic with genuine interest, and with a warehouse of fascinating facts and observations at his command. Dewdney arranges his latest essay-text Acquainted With The Night around the hours from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.—a chapter an hour—using the loose structure as a way of organizing his own pick-up knowledge of nocturnal animals, human sleep patterns, graveyard-shift employees, children's books, and the concept of "night" itself.
The quality of the discussion varies by design. Some of Dewdney's digressions verge on dryness, like his nitpicky breakdown of how the science of daylight relates to the construction of time. More often, he gets on a good roll, as when he recounts the history of city streetlights, and considers the possibility that mankind may have blundered in inventing artificial light and extending the day beyond what's healthy. Acquainted With The Night's organic flow prevents it from being readily skimmable, but some sections do break off into excerpt-worthy mini-essays, like Dewdney's awestruck analysis of Goodnight Moon and the work of Maurice Sendak.
Acquainted With The Night works as a rough anthology of Dewdney's omnivorous passions in part because the author possesses a natural flair for description. Recalling the most beautiful sunset he's ever seen, Dewdney cites "a gridlike archipelago of fluorescent crimson cloudlets set against a pale, lost blue sky above a moody mountain landscape of lavender clouds." Dewdney's tendency to wax poetic gives Acquainted With The Night a larger scope, as he keeps cycling back to night's essential fascination as a territory few get to explore fully. The book opens with Dewdney's own childhood memories of sneaking into his backyard after bedtime, and the sense that he was stealing time by staying awake in the dark. Even at its most cursory, Acquainted With The Night has that same charge of illicit excitement, as Dewdney looks at how the familiar becomes alien after sundown.