A Thousand and One Unanimous Nights

"Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche."
"No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night."
- The Circular Ruins, Jorge Luis Borges

Readers of Borges are unanimous in their curiosity about that choice of adjective. Its author later disowned the word, calling it an example of his early, irresponsible writing and allowing it to be translated as 'encompassing' in some English editions. Yet there is something undeniably enchanting about that word. He had intended it to take its meaning from the Latin roots, so he was referring to a one-souled night. But even if he had recanted his mistake, Borges is much like a father who has no idea how his son will turn out (an apposite analogy given the plot of that story), having stumbled onto a very real phenomenon with 'the unanimous night' - one which is endangered by captivity within our modern metropolis.

There are two possible interpretations of 'unanimous night'. The first is a night on which there is only one soul to begin with - a night of solitude. The second is one on which many souls join as one - a night of consensus.

Solitude has become a rare commodity these days. With so many people around, there is no place to be alone. Nor the time, with our hectic schedules. Yet its loss has hardly been mourned, with a common expectation that our nights will be filled with communal fun, and consequently almost a belief that those alone at night are friendless losers. Ironically, the large number of people makes it harder to establish deep relationships with others, and some end up lonely in the end.

There is another way to find solitude amidst the crowds. The solipsist believes himself to be always alone, crowd or no crowd. Solipsism is one of those philosophical stances that most people flirt with at some stage in their life, and it is not hard to see its temptation, given the seeming inhumanity of society. We have become frangible and hence faceless.

Solitude is necessary to give our dreams the space to grow. Dreaming is an essentially solitary act, whether we are dreaming our new selves (as in The Circular Ruins) or works of art. No, it is not parthenogenesis, but lone gestation or incubation of the spawn of a thousand sires, hopefully none imposed upon us. Otherwise, it would be an infringement of our inner sanctum, in the style of Inception.

Silence is scarce in a city, for cacophony is the way of the crowd. We don't just phone one another in public; we cacophone. Which is a pity, because noise creates cognitive load and banishes contemplation from the streets. Silence can be hard to find even at night - many cities never sleep, and it is not safe to be out late in those that do.

Thus to find serenity, we must retreat to nature, or our homes (and even then, often only for those who live alone). There, away from censorious eyes and treacherous ears, the artist sketches, the scientist studies, the inventor designs, the rebel plots, and the sage reflects. What a debt civilisation owes to silent lucubration!

The unanimous night drifts over us serendipitously, a nocturne more silent and more compelling than John Cage's 4'33". We must enjoy it when it presents itself. Go out into the moonlight and become your true self, lycanthrope.

But what if it is Walpurgisnacht, and you find yourself with the like-minded, a pack of wolves or a coven of witches? Convene and consecrate the night, for your souls have united with the blessing of Hecate. Consensus is an even rarer phenomenon than solitude and silence, but when it happens it is truly magical, a cold fusion of souls into a conscious energy.

Two people is the minimum for consensus, a criterion often fulfilled by friendship or love. Further up the scale, we have the team spirit of a winning eleven, their stadium of fans exulting at the beautiful game, an audience joined in laughter at a comedian's jokes, or a concert hall moved and thrilled by the virtuosity of a performer. Such unanimous nights are the closest we will come to experiencing the qualia of another, when the barriers between other minds have seemingly dissolved.

But the pursuit of the dream of consensus has led to nightmare, whether in genocides of souls that take too much work to understand, or in totalitarian attempts to forge a single national soul out of millions of diverse materials, which instead create a soulless golem of samopohyb, Václav Havel's term for the automaticity that takes over people under oppression. And with the death of God already proclaimed by Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the murder of the soul is surely too much to bear.

However we may seek our unanimous nights, via solitude or consensus, they will always be too fleeting. Yet they are disproportionately significant, and will form the bulk of the stories of our lives. To live well is to remain conscious of how each unanimous night leads into the next, threads in a tapestry quotidian but noble. And to live like so is to live within a thousand and one unanimous nights that never seem to end.