When the World Used to End at Night

There was a time when, after ten at night, the world became small. The newspaper had already been read, the television had gone quiet, and the people you knew had returned to their own homes. Unless somebody came to your door or the telephone rang, there was no particular reason to know what anyone else was doing. A man might have fifty acquaintances in the city, but at eleven at night only the people under his roof remained. The others had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist until morning.

Perhaps we did not think of this as solitude then. Things which are freely available are rarely considered valuable.

I remember nights when there was really nothing to do. You could put on some music, lie down and stare at the ceiling. The fan sometimes made a small clicking sound. A dog barked somewhere in the lane, a scooter passed, and then the road became quiet again. After that, one had to make do with one's own thoughts.

It sounds almost unbearably empty now, but I am beginning to think there was something in that emptiness.

Suppose someone had said something to you that afternoon. Something rude, perhaps, or unexpectedly kind. There was nowhere for the feeling to go immediately. You carried it home. It sat with you through dinner, followed you while you changed your clothes, and came to bed with you. You might spend half the night inventing better replies to a conversation that had already ended. Sometimes, after thinking about it twenty times, you realised that the person had not meant what you first thought they meant.

The mind is an odd thing. Give it no escape and it begins, eventually, to examine what troubles it. Give it an escape every thirty seconds and it can remain troubled for years without ever quite knowing why. (I am unclear whether this is good or bad, what are we trying tosay, was it not good?)

Happiness too was allowed to linger.

If you had spent a good evening with someone, you came home carrying that evening with you. Perhaps you remembered a joke, or the way the person had looked at you while saying something ordinary. There was no immediate procession of other people's weddings, holidays, promotions, dinners and declarations of love waiting to march through your room.

Your happiness did not have to prove that it was happiness.

That may be one reason old memories sometimes have such peculiar weight. A song belonged to a year, but also to a room, a person, the smell of the house after rain, the yellow light outside a window. You listened to it again and again, partly because you loved it and partly because there was not an endless supply of something newer waiting behind it.

Memory, like pickle, perhaps needs some time undisturbed in the jar. We keep opening the lid every three seconds now.

Even the early internet did not disturb this completely. We used to say that we were "going online", which now sounds almost quaint. But the phrase contained an important truth: you went somewhere. You sat at a computer, did what you had come to do, and then you left. When you stood up from the chair, the internet stayed behind.

Now it follows us to bed.

At midnight I can be lying alone, listening to music, and yet there are hundreds of people somewhere in the room with me. Someone has posted a photograph. Someone is furious about the government. Someone I studied with twenty years ago is holidaying in Italy. Someone has bought a house. Someone's dog has died. Someone is getting married. Someone I have never met is having the worst day of his life.

I know none of these things because I need to know them. I know them because they are available to be known.

That is a very new condition for a human being. For most of our history, the lives of other people became invisible when they moved beyond the range of our eyes and ears. Now absence has almost been abolished. A person may be thousands of kilometres away and still occupy a small corner of your mind every day.

Earlier, if you were lonely, at least the loneliness was simple. There was nobody there. You might dislike the feeling, but you knew its name.

Today's loneliness is more confusing. Everybody seems to be there. You see faces all day, hear opinions, receive messages, watch people laughing, eating, travelling and growing older. Yet none of this necessarily gives you company. It is possible, perhaps for the first time, to be surrounded by people without being in the presence of anyone.

And there is another consequence which troubles me more: if other people never quite leave us, we never quite get ourselves back either.

There was a small mercy in the old world. People disappeared.

A friend went home and, for the night, vanished from your life. You did not know whether he was eating dinner, fighting with his father, reading a book or staring at the ceiling. He did not know what you were doing either. Nothing had happened to the friendship. The day had simply ended.

We sometimes speak of disappearing from one another as though it were a failure of intimacy. Perhaps a little disappearance was what allowed intimacy to survive. You went away, lived some life of your own, and when you met again you had something to tell each other.

There was peace, too, in knowing that for a few hours the world had forgotten you. Nobody was watching. Nobody needed an answer. There was nothing to keep up with because, as far as you knew, nothing was happening.

Of course things were happening. They always were. We simply did not know about them.

And maybe human beings were never meant to know quite this much about one another.

There is always somewhere to go now without going anywhere. Something to read, someone to check, another opinion, another outrage, another life opening before us. The moment the outside world grows quiet, we can summon it back with a thumb.

So we rarely reach that old point at which the world has exhausted itself and there is nothing left to do but remain where we are.

Perhaps boredom once had a purpose which we misunderstood. We treated it as an empty room and spent years trying to escape it. But stay in an empty room long enough and you begin noticing things: the light on the wall, an old memory, a question you have avoided, the person sitting quietly inside you.

We knew fewer people then. We knew less about the world. There is no virtue in ignorance by itself, and I would not want to surrender everything the internet has given us.

But on some nights I wonder whether, in making sure that we would never again be alone, we forgot to ask what being alone had been doing for us all along.