The Night Land Annotated Book
- ISBN-10
- ISBN-13
- 9798632679336
- Pages
- 477
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-03-31
- Author
- William Hope Hodgson
Description
Acquainted With the Night is a book of nonfiction divided up into fourteen chapters: an introduction and a conclusion frame the rest of the work, which comprises twelve chapters, each one focusing upon a single hour during the night. In total, the twelve chapters span every hour between the times of 6 P.M. and 5 A.M., and each hour's chapter has a different theme. It's a novel approach to an essay collection, and it works quite well; the structure is quite pleasing in a manner evocative of a quiet night.The introduction, called "First Night," explains the origin of the book before launching into the origin of "night," both scientifically and etymologically. The narrator (Dewdney) describes his draw toward the night and his motivation for writing this book, which is a beautiful tribute to the hours between dusk and dawn that most people regard as simply lost time. He then goes on to investigate the origin of the word "night," tracing it all the way back to the ancient Hittite language of four millennia ago, where nekus is the word for "night." The various accounts of the creation (or a priori existence) of night are recorded in this section as well. This is the last line of the introduction, and it sets the scene sublimely for the following twelve chapters: "Night is a collective planetary spectacle, it is a mysterious, magical realm, and it is a frontier that we are still exploring" (16).
