I wonder if the title's allusion is familiar to readers today. It's from Genesis 37, where resentful brothers of young Joseph are thinking of his dream that indicates he will have precedence over them.
------19 And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh.
20 Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
21 And Reuben heard it, and he delivered him out of their hands; and said, Let us not kill him.-----
Page references are to the Faber and Faber paperback edition of 1984, which seems to be a photoreprint of the original 1937 publication.
4/De la Mare suggests: Within and without: to me, all that I know of the
within is "mind," and all that I know of the
without is "matter."
I would hesitate completely to endorse this without further reflection, but it must often seem so, at least.
17/ "...to resort to candles even for a few hours is to realise what an aid their gentle light can be to quiet of mind and quiet talk … And, summer or winter, candles are even a kind of company."
18/ "We dance attendance on daylight by instinct and confirmed habit; we should make an assignation with the night."
There are good passages on night and the stars in Dale C. Allison's
The Silence of Angels.
Use the Bortle Scale to evaluate your own night sky:
[
astrobackyard.com]
M31 is the Andromeda Galaxy. On a clear night, I can see it from near my home (i.e. less than 5 minutes' walk) in a rural North Dakota town. In fact, I'm pretty sure I can see it from my yard. Offhand I'd say my immediate night-sky environment may be placed as Bortle Scale Class 4. I'm not savvy enough to spot M33 at the moment.
Let me invite my cosmicist readers to join with me in membership in the International Dark Sky Association.
[
www.darksky.org]
Already de la Mare's book invites us to respond imaginatively to the "ordinary" -- except that, increasingly even when he wrote over 80 years ago, night-darkness may be unavailable in anything like its natural form.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 29 Oct 19 | 10:32AM by Dale Nelson.