Moments of profound darkness are often called night. That’s part of why Elie Wiesel took it for the name of his 1956 Holocaust memoir. Night is a potent metaphor, not only for the way it shrouds in black horrors too unbearable to witness, but also because it creates a temporality that offers hope: If we wait long enough, light will come. Darkness always leads to dawn.

But night—figuratively and literally—has its own rhythms and always has. Though it exists in contrast to the day, night provides conditions that sustain its own people, animals, businesses, and experiences. The tensions between night and day are something of what is captured by Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), when a nine-to-fiver encounters a woman at a diner only to end up navigating the bowels of New York City’s un

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