Night

Lone Light at Dusk  [Flickr page]

[W]e are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

—Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Spokane Looking South Across the River  [Flickr page]

Great fires flicker in the growing twilight. Women break bones for their rich marrow and thread reindeer meat on sticks. Children run between the tents; young men in shirts and light skin pants wrestle and tease one another. Some of them sit quietly and eye the girls, who are well aware of their scrutiny, knowing that marriages will be arranged in coming days. … As night falls, the bands feast on fresh reindeer meat. Then stories begin: tales of successful hunts, of great mammoths, of the deeds of ancestors and mythic hunters.

—Brian Fagan,
Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

Halls of Justice  [Flickr page]

All I claim, all I plead is simple liberty of thought. That is all. I do not pretend to tell what is true and all the truth. I do not claim that I have floated level with the heights of thought, or that I have descended to the depths of things; I simply claim that what idea I have I have a right to express, and any man that denies it to me is an intellectual thief and robber.

—Robert G. Ingersoll, “Lecture on Liberty”

Glow  [Flickr page]

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

—Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

Dashboard at Dusk  [Flickr page]

[T]he next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.

—Sam Harris, Free Will

Magic  [Flickr page]

It is a gray evening turning into night. Already the two gaslamps on the pavement opposite have been pulled to brightness by the lamplighter’s long pole and illumine the raw brick of the warehouse walls. There are several lights on in the rooms of the hotel; brighter on the ground floor, softer above, since as in so many Victorian houses the gaspipes had been considered too expensive to be allowed upstairs, and there oil lamps are still in use.

—John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Candle in the Woods  [Flickr page]

I looked back at the rock to check my position, then ahead to the skyline, and my blood ran cold. There was nothing there but the feathered needles of pine trees, impenetrably black against the spread of stars. Where were the lights of Inverness? If that was Cocknammon Rock behind me, as I knew it was, then Inverness must be less than three miles to the southwest. At this distance, I should be able to see the glow of the town against the sky.

—Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

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See also these blog postings with more of my night and low light photography: Darkness, Cascading Wonders, and Madame Pele

Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out my most “interesting” photos on Flickr. All are Copyright © 2013-14 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.