أَعُوذُ بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

اللہ کے نام سے شروع جو بڑا مہربان نہایت رحم کرنے والا ہے

In the name of ALLAH, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Book "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" By A. Roger Ekirch

A.Roger Ekirch (February 6, 1950, Washington, D.C., United States) is an award-winning author and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech. On the basis of his research into the nighttime, Ekirch was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Book "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" published by W. W. Norton & Company, historian A. Roger Ekirch explores the social history of the Western night before the industrial era, famously revealing that humans used to practice biphasic, or segmented, sleep split into a "first sleep" and "second sleep".

"At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" by historian A. Roger Ekirch is a groundbreaking 2005 social history book. It explores pre-industrial Western society through the lens of nighttime, revealing how ordinary people experienced darkness before the advent of widespread artificial lighting and modern clocks.

It is said that around half the population of the modern UK have never seen the Milky Way. This may be true or false assumption but the same may be applicable to all cities of the world. This indicates that how far we have moved from the nighttime world of our ancestors of just a few centuries ago. Many people today will never have experienced the absolute black darkness of a moonless night away from artificial lighting.

In the Book "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" By A. Roger Ekirch, the author tries to recreate a world that is hardly experienced by most humans living in cities. Incidentally the book only talks about Europe and North America, and mainly the British Isles; as the author openly admits that he relied heavily on diaries, journals etc from the past of these regions; but his may be true for all cities across globe. The central theme of A. Roger Ekirch’s "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" is that night in the pre-industrial Western world (roughly the 16th through 18th centuries) possessed a distinct, rich culture and a rhythm of life entirely separate from the daytime. This is about "Life and Perceptions after Dark" and "The History of Sleep" as shown below:-

A Separate Realm: Darkness created an alternative world that offered both sanctuary and a release for repressed desires, alongside profound vulnerability.

Perils and Fears: Nighttime was heavily associated with danger, provoking widespread anxiety over crime, fire, and the supernatural and malicious prowlers.

Social and Domestic Habits: Communities gathered after sundown for storytelling, work, and socializing, while illicit activities flourished in taverns and shadows.

Segmented Sleep: Ekirch famously revealed that pre-industrial humans did not sleep in one continuous eight-hour block.

First and Second Sleep: People naturally experienced "first sleep" and "second sleep," bridged by an hour or more of quiet wakefulness used for prayer, reflection, intimacy, or chores.

Modern Transformation: The Industrial Revolution and widespread artificial street lighting eventually erased these traditional nocturnal patterns, consolidating human sleep into a single block.

The book contains 12 chapters, which are organized into four thematic parts.

Part 1: In the Shadow of Death – Focuses on the profound fears and mortal perils of the darkness, including supernatural terrors, fires, and violent crimes.

Chapter 1: Terrors of the Night: Heavens and Earth – Details how people feared the dark as a supernatural domain populated by demons, witches, and ghosts, alongside a deep dread of cosmic signs.

Chapter 2: Mortal Perils: Plunder, Violence, and Fire – Explores the very real physical dangers of the unlit night, notably the constant threats of violent crime, burglaries, and devastating house fires.

Part 2: Laws of Nature – Examines how traditional authorities (church and state) tried to govern the night, how people fortified their homes, and how they physically navigated unlit landscapes.

Chapter 3: The Fragility of Authority: Church and State – Investigates how institutions attempted to curb nocturnal chaos using tools like curfews, town walls, and night watchmen.

Chapter 4: A Man's House Is His Castle: Domestic Fortifications – Focuses on how families secured their homes each night, using heavy locks, bars, and rituals to turn the household into a fortress.

Chapter 5: Darkness Visible: Navigating the Nightscape – Explores how people physically traveled through pitch-black rural and urban environments using stars, torches, moon cycles, and basic memory.

Part 3: Benighted Realms – Explores the distinct nightlife culture, detailing the nocturnal labor, subcultures, elite socializing, and tavern life that occurred after sunset.

Chapter 6: Works of Darkness: Labor – Looks at the economic necessity of nighttime work, profiling people who had to toil after dark, from bakers to agricultural workers.

Chapter 7: The Common Benefactress: Sociability, Sex, and Solitude – Discusses the positive side of night as a rare window of personal freedom for elite socializing, courting, intimacy, and peaceful reflection.

Chapter 8: Knight Walkers: Princes and Peers – Focuses on how the upper classes and nobility utilized the night for exclusive entertainment, masquerades, and late-night carousing.

Chapter 9: Masters by Night: Plebeians – Documents how the working class, youths, and marginalized groups used the cover of darkness to escape daytime hierarchies, drink at taverns, or riot.

Part 4: Private Worlds – Delves into the bedroom rituals, sleep disturbances, and the historical reality of biphasic (segmented) sleep patterns.

Chapter 10: Ordinances of the Bedchamber: Rituals – Examines the specific evening customs families performed right before bed, such as saying prayers, banking the hearth fire, and setting up shared bedding.

Chapter 11: Unravelling the Knitted Sleave: Disturbances – Details the physical discomforts that plagued sleepers, including bedbugs, extreme cold, illness, and haunting nightmares.

Chapter 12: Sleep We Have Lost: Rhythms and Revelations – Unveils the book's core discovery: the traditional pattern of biphasic sleep (first sleep, a period of midnight wakefulness, and second sleep) that was ultimately wiped out by industrialization.

This book may be called as a history of night-time of our recent past. Ekirch’s themes are the activities, cultural perceptions, and material details of nighttime in the West before the transformation of electric light. He draws upon sources including diaries, books, plays, poetry, and court records, as well as including a pleasingly large number of illustrations. The most compelling parts could be the accounts of how darkness provided a measure of freedom to the oppressed.

Night, by contrast, was neither a set piece of ritual license nor a temporary escape from reality. Instead, it represented an alternate reality for a substantial set of the preindustrial population, a realm of its own that, at a minimum, implicitly challenged the institutions of the workaday world. As a resident of Maryland said of slaves, “Though you have them slaves all the day, they are not so in the night.”

There is a discussion of sleeping habits and dreams, as Ekirch points out, just because the pre-industrial populations weren’t kept awake by light, it does not follow that they all slept well. Illness, cold, bed sharing, bugs, marauders, fire, and concerns about all of the above prevented sleep very effectively. He is nonetheless rather fascinated by the first and second sleep structure that apparently resulted when people went to bed earlier. Those who habitually stayed up later, which is now all of us, instead tended not to have a two hour gap between blocks of sleep. Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams has further details of the debate on how ‘natural’ this habit of sleep might be.

• “Enhanced self-awareness”: For all the opportunities that nighttime afforded for courting and companionship, it also permitted preindustrial folk unprecedented freedom to explore their own individuality. On myriad evenings, growing numbers of men and women devoted an hour or more to solitude and mental reflection, resulting ultimately in an enhanced self-awareness.

• “An intimate atmosphere”: On top of everything else, darkness generated an intimate atmosphere in which words of affection flowed more freely. Low levels of light, whether from a candle or lamp, brought couples closer together, physically and emotionally…With sight impaired, hearing, touch, and smell, with their greater power to arouse emotions, all acquired heightened importance.

• “An alternate reality”: Night…represented an alternate reality for a substantial segment of the preindustrial population, a realm of its own that, at a minimum, implicitly challenged the institutions of the workaday world. As a resident of Maryland said of slaves, “Though you have them slaves all the day, they are not so at night.”

• “Hunts”: In preparation for sleep, families engaged in “hunts” of furniture and bedding for both fleas (palex irritans) and bedbugs (cimex lectularius), which had arrived in Britain by the sixteenth century. Lice (pediculus humanus) needed to be combed from hair and picked from clothing and skin….To keep gnats at bay, families in the fen county of East Anglia hung lumps of cow dung at the foot of their beds, whereas John Locke advised placing the leaves of kidney beans about a bed to avert insect bites.

• “A state of mind”: More important still, nighttime, by its very nature, connoted freedom from the constraints of daily life, the innumerable rules and obligations that repressed gaiety and playfulness. Night…was a state of mind.

• “Ordure”: “Night soil” was the euphemism coined for the ordure that professional nightmen hauled in buckets [out of cesspits] to waiting carts. Some families, like the Pepys household, benefited from sharing their cellar with a neighbor. “So to bed,” Samuel wrote in July 1863, “leaving the man below in the cellar emptying the turds up through Mr. Turner’s own house…”

• “Beyond government control”: Ultimately, night lay beyond government control, a natural law that neither courts nor constables could change. A tenacious fatalism, grounded in an awareness of God’s omnipotence and man’s frailty, undergirded the official mindset.

There is a section related to the particular rituals and customs associated with night-time that have now vanished. The highlight is a description of how walled cities were closed off at night. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is quoted, relating an occasion where he failed to make it back to Geneva before the gates came down, leaving him stranded outside the city walls at night. There was also an interesting discussion about the social role of the most popular form of aristocratic entertainment at night, the masked ball. In pre-modern times social relations within the aristocracy were tightly controlled by rules of etiquette, but “By stripping persons of their identity, they [the balls] undermined distinctions between social ranks, with all revelers re-created equal.”

Nighttime was a period when the social order was reversed in another sense, when slaves, servants, vagrants etc took control and often consciously revenged themselves on the upper echelons, through actions such as theft, vandalism, and arson, perpetrated under cover of darkness. Those actions posed a threat to the existing social order, though there was another aspect in which nighttime violence upheld prevailing moral standards. This was in what was known in England as the “Skimmington ride” (or Skimity ride), a form of vigilante activity that involved public humiliation of those adjudged to have breached community morals. This ritual apparently features in Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Some might call it community justice, others might call it mob justice – take your pick.

There’s also a discussion about the past practice - a commonplace one – of “the two sleeps” where people would wake in the middle of the night for an hour or two of quiet wakefulness. Writers up to the 19th century refer to this in ways that make it clear the authors saw it as something so normal it did not require explanation, and yet it is almost unknown today.

What Ekirch set out to do in this book was to look at the myriad aspects of life after dark for the people in preindustrial Europe and North America (generally 1500 through 1750). He looks at how people got around (and didn’t) in the dark, how they used moonlight and candlelight to see after sunset, how they acted on the roadways and in their homes at night, and much, much, much more. And he succeeds wonderfully in examining hundreds of ways in which life after dark was different than life in the daylight — and, by implication, the ways in which life at night in the preindustrial world was different than life at night in the present-day.

For instance, did you ever wonder what it must have been like to fall ill in a world before electricity and other artificial illumination? Ekirch did, and he reports. "Not only was sickness common, but darkness contributed its share of injuries. Families possessed a passing knowledge of remedies and cures, combined with a small inventory of potions, plasters, and possets, some acquired from the local cunning men [folk healers]…Tormented one evening by a throbbing earache, [Parson Woodforde] placed a roasted onion in his ear. When shortly before midnight, the Virginia squire Landon Carter thought his slave Daniel near death, he prescribed twenty or thirty drops of liquid laudanum in mint water, followed an hour later by a “vomit of Ipecacuana.”

The core lesson of the Book "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" By A. Roger Ekirch is that modern technology has radically rewritten human biology, social behavior, and psychological life by erasing the natural boundary between day and night. The most famous lesson is that modern sleep is not a timeless human default. For millennia, human biology thrived on segmented (biphasic) sleep—resting in two distinct phases broken up by an hour of peaceful, creative midnight wakefulness.

Before gas and electric light, the rotation of the earth strictly dictated human activity. The night was a hard stop to productivity. Industrialization and the lightbulb transformed the night into an extension of the workday. The quiet midnight interval between the "first" and "second" sleep was a sacred space. People used it to pray, analyze dreams, talk deeply with partners, or simply think in total stillness without social pressures. To our ancestors, the night was a powerful, tactile reality. They possessed a heightened awareness of lunar cycles, weather, and seasonal changes because navigating the dark required sensory acuity. Modern life has completely sterilized the night.

So my dear Readers! If you wake up in the middle of the night, it is not always a medical failure or insomnia; it is often your body reverting to an ancient, natural biological rhythm. While technology freed us from the constraints of darkness, it created a hyper-productive, 24/7 society that values constant labor over natural rest, leaving the modern world chronically sleep-deprived. By filling every waking minute of the night with artificial light and digital entertainment, we have lost a crucial, built-in window for deep reflection, spiritual grounding, and meaningful personal intimacy. Urbanization and light pollution have isolated us from the cosmos. Reconnecting with the dark—such as limiting artificial light exposure at night—can help restore our mental health and circadian balance.