“I have been one acquainted with the night
I have walked out in rain— and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.”
These lines are from the Robert Frost poem that gives this book its name, which is entitled "Acquainted With the Night." They convey a sense of contemplation and serenity in dwelling upon the night, revealing the beauty latent in what could be seen as merely the absence of light. This quiet, meditative philosophy pervades Dewdney's prose, as well as the structure of the book as a whole. This poem, used as the book's epigraph, could be seen as its mission statement: it intends to allow this statement to be applicable to its readers.
“Night is a collective planetary spectacle, it is a mysterious, magical realm, and it is a frontier that we are still exploring.”
This sentence is the final one of the first chapter, "First Night." It is essentially the thesis statement of this essay collection; it conveys the depths of night's mysterious beauty while admitting that these depths have not yet been fully probed. This book will attempt to explain the mysteries of the night while transferring the sense of wonder that has so possessed the author. This book will acquaint its reader with the night in the best possible way.
“The darkness of finite space causes the darkness of night; they are one and the same.”
This quote concludes the final mini-essay of Chapter 2, which is entitled "Olbers' Paradox: Why Night is Dark." The paradox Olbers posed is this: if there are an enormous number of stars in the universe, and atmospheric dust can only obscure so much light, why is night dark instead of blazing with the light from countless stars? Edgar Allan Poe was actually right in his surmise, confirmed by Edwin Hubble years later, that it's because the light from these distant stars has not yet reached the Earth, proving that the universe had a beginning (a theory Hubble proved in greater detail later). The darkness of Earth's night is therefore due to the darkness of the space between this planet and the distant stars.
