Nighttime Finds Readers Opening New Worlds

Summary

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In the dark Milwaukee night, when the world sleeps and the silence is broken only by the whisper of an occasional car, Anne Wilde tosses and turns and tosses and reaches for a book from the pile on her bedside table.

"I love night," she reads, as she begins a favorite book by Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney. "Some of my earliest memories are of magical summer evenings, the excitement I felt at night's arrival, its dark splendor. Later, when I was eleven, there were hot summer nights, especially if the moon was bright, when I felt irresistibly drawn outside. . . . After quietly shutting the back door behind me, I was free, deliciously alone in the warm night air. A bolt of pure electric joy would rush through me as I stepped into the bright stillness of the moonlit yard."

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Nighttime Finds Readers Opening New Worlds

It is all familiar, a familiar paragraph, familiar words, as familiar as her sleeplessness.

Wilde has read Dewdney's "Acquainted With the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark" a dozen or more times. His hour-by- hour exploration of a nocturnal world -- its beauties and darkness, its creatures, its starlit sky, its nightclubs and neon, its graveyard shifts -- soothes her as she lies awake. An...

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