The joy of tuning in to the night

‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,’ wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.’

Her thought extends beyond ‘compassion fatigue’ in the face of global suffering on a scale beyond our homely ken, but to life itself in its unfathomable abundance: the dramas, the joys and the sorrows and the sheer activity that surrounds us and would engulf us if we paused for long enough to think about everything. We screen almost all of it out. We have to.

Our Derbyshire home is on a hillside in the middle of fields and woods. I have sunk an ordinary bath into the earth near the outdoor coal shed: the kind of cast-iron thing that farmers turn into makeshift drinking troughs for cattle. For £5 I bought one, pristine save for slight discolouration of the enamel, still complete with taps and plug. Plumbed into our domestic hot and cold water pipes, it made for a perfect al fresco bath, the waste water piped down into a little wood. I’ve insulated the sides and underside, and the bubbles from a dash of Radox create an effective layer of insulation on the warm water’s surface. Our secret bath is hidden from the drive and the house windows, and you can lie there at sunset, at dawn, or under the stars, and fall into a long and deep meditation. I did so around midnight on Saturday, a glass of red wine by the soap dish. It was almost 1 a.m. before I slipped back into my dressing gown, and to bed. In the wind you don’t need a towel: just stand, steaming, for less than a minute, and you’re dry.

Time had flown. But that hour was not a void – it was anything but blank. Instead it was, as it turned out, crowded with incident. Instead of screening out, I screened in the night. And there was so much going on.

How often do we lie on our backs, face up to the sky, and simply stare at it? There was, as usual in the north Midlands, a north-westerly wind. There was a waxing moon, almost full. The sky was boiling with silvered vapour blotting out and then revealing the bright stars. The stars themselves seemed to scamper between them. Rags of cloud tore above me, forming, evaporating, exploding into fragments. Whole cloudy continents assembled, drifted, disintegrated – and so fast! One minute it appeared as though the whole sky was clouding permanently over. Three minutes later – gone!

The moon herself seemed to dash through the clouds – and now I learned something new. I’d always supposed that though at ground level the wind gusts and changes, fickle and variable, it would be steady higher up, its path fixed. Not so. Watching moon against blowing cloud, I saw that up there too the wind eddies and swirls, blustery, with very sharp changes of direction. The beech tree above me offered an audible display of wind speed and I learned that strong wind comes in pulses, with almost windless pauses in between. With every pulse, orange beech leaves, autumnal, rained from above.

Then I saw our four llamas, wide awake, standing in the moonlight, alert and listening. I heard an owl hoot and screech, and thought of the thousands of rodents – mice, voles, shrews and rats – scurrying amid the long grass, the owl’s hoot a terrible sound to them.

I looked past our stone wall at a line of ash trees, each one in a desperate fight for survival as the ash-dieback fungus, its spores borne on the wind, assails each tree. Some seemed to be holding their own; other trees have died already; most were extending bony bare twigs aloft, like skeletal fingers, the mark of an advancing infection. In ten years’ time, how many ash trees shall we have left in the Peak District, where they have been dominant? Nobody knows. There’s a cosmic battle going on out there.

I watched a satellite glide across the heavens, and then a plane – probably en route to Manchester airport. How many souls were seated inside, each with their own thoughts and plans, their hopes and expectations upon landing hidden even from their fellow passengers? Or perhaps they were asleep, dreaming in different languages.

A loud bang startled me, and for a moment the noise puzzled me. But of course! It was a beechnut hitting the steel roof of Julian’s horse-trailer beneath. The squirrels would be back by dawn, foraging, but where were they now? Where do squirrels sleep? Alone or in family groups?

A bat flitted across my vision, coming from near our roof. I’ve seen the marks of scrabbling by a small hole in the stone gable: is that where he lives, in an attic to which we have no access? Every night as I sleep in bed, scores of bats may be hanging from rafters in the loft above my pillow, breathing quietly: their lives, their natures, their struggles, their very existence unknown to me: scores of tiny fellow mammals, very close.

The owl hooted again; a llama spat noisily in irritation with her companions. Another bat. A great pulse of wind shook the beech. Another loud beechnut on the roof. The moon went in. All this, for an hour packed with incident, now so strong in my mind and memory. But it was only an hour – and these things are going on all night, every night, as I sleep, or even when I wake, glancing momentarily at my clock radio.

We live, and can only live, by screening out, blocking, avoiding, excluding. ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,’ concludes Eliot, ‘it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.’