{"id":2306,"date":"2009-04-13T13:21:20","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T20:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/04\/13\/a-history-of-night\/"},"modified":"2009-04-13T13:21:20","modified_gmt":"2009-04-13T20:21:20","slug":"a-history-of-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/13\/a-history-of-night\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of Night"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>April is going to be Poetry Month all month long!  <em>The New York Review of Books<\/em> is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/poetry-month\/\">celebrating<\/a>.  Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/7923\">one from Jorge Luis Borges<\/a>, translated by Alastair Reid.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>A History of Night<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>    Through the course of generations<br \/>\n    men brought the night into being.<br \/>\n    In the beginning were blindness and dream<br \/>\n    and thorns which gash the bare foot<br \/>\n    and fear of wolves.<br \/>\n    We shall never know who fashioned the word<br \/>\n    for the interval of darkness<br \/>\n    which divides the two half-lights.<br \/>\n    We shall never know in what century it stood<br \/>\n    for the starry spaces.<br \/>\n    Others began the myth.<br \/>\n    They made night mother of the tranquil Fates<br \/>\n    who weave all destiny<br \/>\n    and sacrificed black sheep to her<br \/>\n    and the rooster which announced her end.<br \/>\n    The Chaldeans gave her twelve houses;<br \/>\n    infinite worlds, the Stoic Portico.<br \/>\n    Latin hexameters molded her,<br \/>\n    and Pascal&#8217;s dread.<br \/>\n    Luis de Le\u00f3n saw in her the homeland<br \/>\n    of his shivering soul.<br \/>\n    Now we feel her inexhaustible<br \/>\n    as an old wine<br \/>\n    and no one can think of her without vertigo,<br \/>\n    and time has charged her with eternity.<\/p>\n<p>    And to think that night would not exist<br \/>\n    without those tenuous instruments, the eyes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>April is going to be Poetry Month all month long! The New York Review of Books is celebrating. Here&#8217;s one from Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alastair Reid. A History of Night Through the course of generations men brought the night into being. In the beginning were blindness and dream and thorns which gash the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}