white nights

Hello,

I’ve tried to write this one for almost a year now, such is the strength of my love for a long night and a testament to how much I can fit into the witching hours.

It’s only one, right? It’s only two, right? It’s only three, right? It’s only four, right? It’s only five, right?

Come on, let’s have ourselves a white night.

—

The concept of ‘white nights’ was first introduced to me in 2019 via Paris’ Nuit Blanche, translating directly to white night. Young and naive, we traversed the length of Le Marais in search of art and cheap wine and movement. Literally, a white night refers to one of those nights experienced in the most northern latitudes, where the sun forgets to set in the summers. More literarily, it means a sleepless night, an endless night (witness Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights, witness Éric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, witness André Aciman’s Eight White Nights, witness the Beaches’ Last Girls at the Party).

I love a long night. I’m a night owl, always have been. Although the habit may have worsened with age, I think I am most myself at the hours between midnight and four in the morning.

I love the way people become in the middle of the night. Intimacies are amplified. When the day darkens, but you are still awake, any person, any room, any street corner can consume entire worlds. When the universe narrows, the perimeters start to blur. All your sentimental/philosophical/spiritual innards can be slammed onto the big screen in front of you.

A white night is a shortcut to intimacies because those residual hard edges can be softened by a well-earned sleep and the enviable grace of the sun. It’s a shortcut to vulnerability because we count on being forgotten by the witness, forgiven by the voyeur, forsaken by the self.

Terrace tables and whiskey neat. A bouquet of roses outside Salsero for my birthday. Busting my knees in front of an icy gate. The trek through the porticoes after the club closed. A palm reading in a smokey room. Waiting for the metro to open again outside a karaoke spot. An old woman telling me about her younger lover over glasses of Côtes du Rhône. Smoking on an old man’s balcony where I can hear the planes take off. Unexpected confessions on a West Campus curbside, on a Canal Saint Martin bridge, on a bed in her aunt’s apartment. At night, people love to talk about love. Monet worked all his life for the ill-defined street lamp, the passing church facade, the deathbed beauty – burgeoning truths from continuous color.

And always, there is the birdsong and the blue that reemerges from between the corners of roofs – a Cezanne blue, so hazy that it smells like a dream you were never meant to have. There is a grain of beauty in greeting the wrong end of the sunrise, in the unreality before you crash.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Extremely on the nose! But the edition that I read included a few other of his short stories related to those strange Russian nights and the illusory games that our minds and hearts can play upon us. I can’t speak to the discourse of Russian translators, but I think White Nights is a good entry point into that era of tediously long 19th century literature.

Are you a night owl? When’s the last time you stayed up all night? There are actually many of these newsletters that were dispatched at two or three am for me lol.

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie