5.The night and stars: Henry Beston on Cape Cod in the 1920s

‘With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night?  Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?…Be the answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.’

from ‘The Outermost House’, Chapter 8: ‘Night on the Great Beach’