Evenings are getting shorter and colder. But this is no reason to be discouraged. On the contrary, autumn and winter give us the opportunity to slow down the rhythm and enjoy the magic of the night. English writer Janet Winterson explains why she loves the dark season.
It’s so human to crave warmth and light. Our pagan ancestors kept a calendar of fire festivals, and the first words of God recorded in the Bible were: “Let there be light.” The night belongs to the dark side: scary monsters, thieves sneaking into the house, the unknown. The triumph of electricity over the night has brought more security to our lives, and at the same time more trouble.
But no matter how long our day is, they take away the darkness from us.
Now we live in a world that does not stop for a minute and is illuminated twenty-four hours a day. The night still comes at the appointed hour, but we have a choice – to spend it in the dark or in the light. Our 24/7 lifestyle has gradually destroyed the night. In fact, we now perceive the night as a flawed day. And yet slowness and silence are quite different, the rhythm of the night is a necessary half of the daytime.
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It seems to me that we should stop resisting the night – learn to celebrate the change of seasons and set ourselves up for autumn and winter, and the preparation should not be limited to turning on the heating, leaving the lamps on at night and constantly complaining about the darkness and cold.
Night and darkness are good for us. As the nights get longer, space opens up to dream. Have you ever spent an evening without electric light?
Whether you live in the city or outside the city, it doesn’t matter. On weekends, bring plenty of candles into the house and light a fire in the fireplace if you have one. Prepare dinner in advance and plan a walk so that you come home at dusk, a magical time on the threshold between light and dark, when they meet and turn against each other, as if on hinges.
Turn off the lights. We’ve all experienced the uncomfortable darkness of being unable to sleep and worrying about everything in the world, so we know that the hours of darkness can seem infinitely longer than the days of the day. And yet nothing helps to relax like slowing down. An evening by candlelight and maybe near a fireplace – without TV, when we just talk and tell stories, leaving the lit world outside to burn without us, expands space and time, changes our thoughts and conversations.
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I have noticed that in the electric light we tend to talk about what is on our mind – our outer life. Sitting in company by candlelight or near a fireplace, we begin to talk about what is in our souls – about our inner life. We talk about personal things, we argue less, the pauses become longer.
In winter I read more, write more, think more, sleep more. I do not set myself this goal in advance – rather, I do not resist the temptations of darkness.
And what could be better on a winter evening than being in bed with someone you love? If it’s raining outside, it will only enhance the pleasure. And don’t turn on the light. Shakespeare’s story with the bed – when it’s so dark around that the characters end up in bed and make love to someone completely different from who they were going to, but in the end it turns out that the stranger or the stranger is exactly that half – could never play out in our brightly lit bedrooms. Only the soft corduroy of darkness can turn an ordinary evening in bed with our lover into an exciting date with a stranger.
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Making love on a winter night is not the same as making love on a summer night. Start when twilight is barely looming outside the window, wake up warm and heavy in complete darkness, kiss and caress an invisible body nearby, and then, leaving your loved one half asleep, go to the kitchen to open the wine. And now you are already standing barefoot in the kitchen, in your hands there is only a candle and two glasses that you will take with you to bed, and you are overcome by a feeling of indescribable happiness.
Maybe this is an illusion or the love hormone oxytocin is acting, but the gift of darkness is also a gift – it slows down and thereby increases the time of love and night.
I love the slowness of autumn and winter evenings.
When friends from London come to visit me out of town – excited by the electric light, like hamsters that race on the wheel 24 hours 7 days a week, I know how to relax and slow them down. I cook dishes for them with darkness sealed inside: deep red venison stewed in claret, carp from the bottom of the river, root crops grown in fertile black earth.
Just as our bodies use the sun to stock up on vitamin D for the winter, root vegetables that ripen in the fall and winter store the sun’s energy. They are like little black suns from alchemy – they glow inside. Small red radishes and ruby black beets, ocher rutabagas and deep orange circles of carrots – eating them, we get the energy contained in the dark skin.
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Eating according to the season is not just a “green” fashion: this is how our body remains firmly rooted in reality. Start eating according to the season, and you will feel how quickly your spirit and mind will clear up.
What a pleasure, returning home on a chilly evening, pour a glass of good red wine and start cooking some kind of “dish of darkness” – mushroom risotto or beef stew with cabbage and truffle puree. If you only have 15 minutes to cook, have it be mushrooms on toast with chopped parsley. Don’t forget good red wine. This style of eating is surprisingly uplifting in the fall and winter – because it’s exactly what the body needs.
The surest way to drive yourself into depression is to spend long winter evenings eating out-of-season food. No, now is not the time for Caesar salads, fast food store food or something light, diet, low-calorie. After a day at the office and a brisk walk home – even if it takes an hour – only a real winter meal can restore good spirits.
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Keep your bedroom cool in the fall, don’t make it warmer. In winter, let it stay a little cool, so that the cold tingles your body a little before you jump into bed with a bottle of hot water as a heating pad and a good book.
I have a tiny wood stove on my friend’s balcony in London. She thinks I’m crazy when I sit in front of the stove in the dark to heat up a pot of soup or toast chestnuts. Yes, I can do it on her trendy high-tech stove, but I like it this way – there are city lights around, and it’s dark on the balcony, and I’m lost in thought, but I’m not at all sad.
Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, lovemaking, slowness, silence, books, the change of seasons – our life is too short to be considered only daytime. Night – no less; actually it is more.
See more at The Guardian.