Inspired by this, I thought to reply in hopefully some similar spirit:
There has always been a certain piercing peace that the night moment spoke to me in. It was a kind of forgiveness from the sense of urgency that had chased me throughout my life: there had always been the aura of wolves and crows in their metaphorical selves, the former portent of some undefined but unpleasant antagonist to elapse upon me, the latter to herald and feast upon whatever misery that was to happen.
But the darktime held an abeyance from that, as if the world had frozen for some certain moments and the wolves, too, had settled away. In those moments was something of grace, and in grace, we find beauty.
There is a certain quiet gripe at modernity in these moments, when I flick back to a little place in Bavaria(for surely they rejected being called German). I remember a town sans electricity, for the people there thought artificial light an affront to God. I was there for a night or three, but the memory lingers ever so and I think, always will. At evening, at the inn, I remember the hearth was the one great source of fire and light. And so the people came in, two by twos or even on four feet(dogs like warmth like all do), and as we gathered by the great fire and the bitter beer, there was this sense of being, of presence, and community that still circles to me now. And beyond that, the dark. A peaceful one.
Not one that lasted, alas.
In the early morning, I remember a few streetlights outside, made required by the government and the children waiting for the schoolbuses, mandated in the same.
I don't suppose the town exists anymore. There was a soul distinct once, and in the same way that I remember my childlike disappointment that Zurich seemed less distinct from New York than I had hoped, so the same soul distinct had become a soul monocultured.