Acquainted With the Night is a book of nonfiction divided up into fourteen chapters: an introduction and a conclusion frame the rest of the work, which comprises twelve chapters, each one focusing upon a single hour during the night. In total, the twelve chapters span every hour between the times of 6 P.M. and 5 A.M., and each hour's chapter has a different theme. It's a novel approach to an essay collection, and it works quite well; the structure is quite pleasing in a manner evocative of a quiet night.
The introduction, called "First Night," explains the origin of the book before launching into the origin of "night," both scientifically and etymologically. The narrator (Dewdney) describes his draw toward the night and his motivation for writing this book, which is a beautiful tribute to the hours between dusk and dawn that most people regard as simply lost time. He then goes on to investigate the origin of the word "night," tracing it all the way back to the ancient Hittite language of four millennia ago, where nekus is the word for "night." The various accounts of the creation (or a priori existence) of night are recorded in this section as well. This is the last line of the introduction, and it sets the scene sublimely for the following twelve chapters: “Night is a collective planetary spectacle, it is a mysterious, magical realm, and it is a frontier that we are still exploring” (16).
The second chapter concerns the first hour of night: 6 pm. This chapter concerns sunsets, and as it progresses, the focus shifts from sunsets to the general turning of day into night. Scientific and poetic explanations are given for the phenomenon of sunset, as well as how the night extends around the world. The chapter closes with an interesting essay on Olbers' Paradox and the darkness of the night sky: apparently, Edgar Allan Poe was right when he theorized that the only reason the night sky isn't blazing with starlight is that the universe is expanding from a single point of beginning, and the light from the stars hasn't reached the Earth yet.
The third chapter talks about the night from the perspective of various animals, detailing how bats, insects, nighthawks, nocturnal predators, and night-glowing plankton, among others, are affected by and, in turn, influence the night. Chapter Four follows the development of bedtime stories for children, tracing books such as Grimm's Fairy Tales all the way to Alice in Wonderland and Where the Wild Things Are. The next chapter, number five, deals with the reactions of cities and civilizations to the limitations of night. This section includes descriptions of things like nightclubs, light pollution, and prostitution.
Chapter Six, the ten o'clock hour, concerns various nighttime festivals from around the world, including Christmas Eve, Wakakusa Yamayaki, and Walpurgisnacht, among others, before concluding with discussions of fireworks stemming from said festivals. Eleven o'clock (Chapter Seven) brings discussions of the biological phenomena that accompany sleep and the advent of darkness, including circadian rhythms and dreaming. Chapter Eight, the midnight chapter, is entirely about the phenomena, interpretation, and experience of dreams, drawing on such sources as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Chapter Nine talks about various personifications of night across the broad scope of mythology and literature, including those attributed to the Romantic poets, Shakespeare, Bram Stoker, and Joseph Conrad.
The tenth chapter, set at two o'clock a.m., deals with stars. It follows both the mythology and the science of different celestial bodies and the formations thereof, including Greek personifications like Nyx as well as scientific discoveries of those like Edwin Hubble. At three o'clock, the reader discovers the history and science of insomnia, while four o'clock brings discussions of perpetually dark places like subterranean caverns and locations like the poles of the Earth. The penultimate chapter, and the last hour (five o'clock), deals with using darkness as a medium of art, including with film (noir) and painting (Carravaggio's chiaroscuro), among others.
The book finishes with a conclusion entitled "Night's Land Stand," wherein Dewdney describes the fading of the night as the dawn approaches.
