Past Midnight

There is an hour past midnight when the flat stops asking anything of me. The dishes can wait. The window I keep meaning to close can wait. Even the cup of tea, gone cold an hour ago, is unoffended — at this hour, the cold cup is a fact, not a failure. The light over the kitchen has gone slightly orange in a way I did not order, and the building is settling in its joints the way old buildings do when they think no one is listening.

I have been reading on and off — Sebald, still, the same chapter as yesterday and probably the same as tomorrow. He does not require you to be alert. His sentences arrange themselves so that even a tired man can follow them; they have, in their way, the politeness of a long-married couple who can lower their voices because they know the room.

Nobody told me, growing up, that the late hour was for reading and not for sleeping. I came to it on my own, in my thirties, after years of believing the day was the part you worked in. It turns out the day is for transacting and the late hour is for noticing. The two cannot be done in the same hour; the attention they want is different — the first asks the muscles to be awake, the second asks them to be put away.

There are nights when I am here past two and have not turned a page in forty minutes, and I do not call it wasted. I am attending. The book is on the table. The hour is moving in its slow, unhurried way, and somewhere in the city someone else is awake and has, just now, decided not to make a sound. That is the kind of thing the late hour produces, and the daylight cannot do it.

I should sleep, and I will. But not yet — not while the room is still this quiet, not while the building is still listening so carefully to itself.