Nightwatch

In this essay I examine the features of night, in particular, urban night. I try to highlight the epistemological divide between day and night, light and darkness. Even as light-based experiencing, acting, and thinking, and their cultural tools colonize urban night, nocturnal elements relate dialectically to our daytime reasoning. I conclude with the question of whether a kind of half-tone thinking contained in a trialectic of light, twilight, and darkness would be capable of appreciating the peculiar qualities of night.
The reveries of the weak light guide into the innermost recesses of the familiar. It looks as if there are dark corners where nothing but a fluttering light is suffered....A dreamer of the lamp knows by instinct that the images of the weak light are night lights. Their glow becomes invisible, when thinking is at work, when consciousness is bright. But as soon as thinking has a rest the images watch.
Gaston Bachelard