All the Time in the World

by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

  “How many nights we passed drinking wine,” Zaydu¯n wrote of their nocturnal bliss. But Wallada was no mere muse. A powerful provocateur at the center of the Córdoba scene, she proudly wore her own verses embroidered down the sleeves of her robe, one of which read, “I am, by God, made for glory.”

  She was happy to count herself among the many who found it impossible to resist the sensuous temptations of the Córdoba night. “Pleasure and licentiousness were brought together there, and the stars of its wine were ignited,” another majlis regular remembered. “The face of the moon was manifested from among the flowers, and they passed their night, and sleep did not overcome them.”

  New York City’s nightlife crept uptown at the turn of the twentieth century—from Union Square to Madison Square to Herald Square and finally to Times Square—bringing with it a dazzling display of lights. On Broadway, soon to be known as “the Street of the Midnight Sun,” electric ads lit up every inch of available real estate. The first shone with 1,475 bulbs, spelling “Manhattan Beach, Swept by Ocean Breezes,” and winked on and off as an attendant sitting on a nearby rooftop flicked a switch. Soon, ketchup magnate H. J. Heinz raised a glaring ad for his vivid green pickles. In 1905, the sign for Trimble Whiskey could be seen from a mile away. The biggest ads were called “spectaculars,” and before long they included animated billboards controlled by punched-paper rolls like those that powered a player piano. A lit-up kitten chased a spool of string. Roman charioteers raced across the sky, and a whip-wielding Eskimo drove a team of huskies.

  But writer William Dean Howells (1837–1920) preferred Broadway without its flashy lights. “The darkness does not shield you from them,” he lamented, “and by night the very sky is starred with the electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty city edifices, the frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.” Maybe he was a curmudgeon. Most visitors seemed to love the free entertainment. “With eyes distracted by kaleidoscopic mysteries, they good-naturedly jostle and stumble against each other along the friendly sidewalks of New York,” a reporter wrote in 1927. That year, Broadway’s sponsors invested $20 million in lighting, allowing nearly twenty thousand incandescent bulbs to burn from sunset until 1:00 a.m.

  But Manhattan’s glow was dampened considerably on May 1, 1942, when authorities called for a twenty-minute blackout across the city—a wartime precaution, and a harbinger of things to come. Thousands poured into Times Square to watch the lights go out. The drill was “highly successful and chillingly eerie,” wrote a witness. The army and the police force worked in concert over the next months to protect Allied boats near the coast from the “fatal backdrop” of a too brightly glowing sky. Neon was shaded or extinguished. Theater owners dimmed their marquees. “In almost every instance orders were obeyed, but with much sighing,” The New York Times reported as the district switched off 265,000 lamps and sixty-five miles of neon. “When night comes great hulks of shadow ponderously move into Times Square like an invasion of pre-historic monsters,” a reporter noted. Broadway’s dance halls, theaters, and bars were gloomy. The streets were hushed.

  That is, until three years later, on May 9, 1945, when a spontaneous celebration of the official end to World War II in Europe erupted in the streets. A crowd of 250,000 marched into a brightly lit Times Square, banging drums, blowing bugles, singing, shouting, and ringing cowbells. “In noise-making, uproar, high-jinks and real enthusiasm, it almost duplicated a peace-time New Year’s Eve,” the Times announced. As Broadway’s blazing bulbs lit up the sky, the revelers all but swept one police sergeant off his feet. “They’re light-happy,” he declared.

  While his neighbors slept, the Roman scholar known as Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) went to work in a small, dark room in his Tuscan villa. The hushed isolation and tranquility made it easier to focus on writing his encyclopedic survey of the known natural world, Historia naturalis. “He always began to work at midnight when the August festival of Vulcan came round, not for the good omen’s sake, but for the sake of study, in winter generally at one in the morning, but never later than two,” his son, known as Pliny the Younger, wrote.

  For his part, Pliny the Younger (61–112) sought studious solitude in a diaeta, a small study built in his villa’s garden, and situated so he could gaze at the sea and at the woods, and smell the violets blooming in springtime. “When I retire to this suite I feel as if I have left my house altogether and much enjoy the sensation especially during the Saturnalia when the rest of the roof resounds with festive cries in the holiday freedom,” he explained, “for I am not disturbing my household’s merrymaking nor they my work.”

  Yet not all ancient scholars agreed that easy access to nature aided their focus. While “the absence of company and deep silence are most conducive to writing,” Roman rhetorician Quintilian (ca.35–ca.100) argued, working in a grove or in the woods, where “the freedom of the sky and the charm of the surroundings produce sublimity of thought and wealth of inspiration,” was a “pleasant luxury, rather than a stimulus to study.” All that beauty could prove a distraction, naturally. “Therefore,” he concluded, “let the burner of the midnight oil seclude himself with but a solitary lamp to light his labours.”

  Though he lived centuries later, the Italian poet Petrarch (1304–1374) took inspiration from both Plinys when establishing his secluded retreat. At home in Avignon, his ears “were battered and [his] mind afflicted by the city’s tumult,” he complained. At his country hideaway in Vaucluse, in Provençe, he spent his days alone with his books and his thoughts, “wandering among the meadows, hills, springs and woods” and writing many of his major works, including some of his celebrated love poems to the elusive Laura, and the treatise De vita solitaria (1346), on solitary living. “I flee men’s traces, follow the birds, love the shadows, enjoy the mossy caves and the greening fields, curse the cares of the Curia, avoid the city’s tumult, refuse to cross the thresholds of the mighty, mock the concerns of the mob,” he wrote of life there. “I am equidistant from joy and sadness, at peace day and night. I glory in the Muse’s company, in bird-song and the murmur of the water nymphs.”

  After Petrarch, and as greater numbers of ordinary citizens learned to read, constructing a small, monkish thinking room in one’s house became fashionable. Such a space, called a studiolo (study) or cubiculum lucubratorium (night study), required a large collection of books, and a writing desk, an item previously found only in monasteries, as well as a view, or at least a decent landscape painting.

  But above all, it required utter peace and quiet. “Solitude is indeed something holy,” Petrarch proclaimed, “innocent, incorruptible, and the purest of human possessions.”

  When a young Gyula Halász, the wild-haired Hungarian artist who would become the famed photographer Brassaï (1899–1984), arrived in Paris in 1924, he headed straight to La Rotonde, the buzzing café at the center of the city’s avant-garde ex-pat scene, and the place where everyone from Picasso to Hemingway passed the days and nights. “This is the artists’ haunt in Montparnasse,” he wrote home to his parents, “a place where my hair was duly appreciated at last. What lovely, charming women—my God!”

  He made just enough money to scrape by, working as a journalist, selling drawings, caricatures, portraits, and articles, candidly sending word home of all his disappointments and his conquests, like Lisette from Alsace—“We danced through the night of New Year’s Eve, like two crazy people, in the street, in bed, at the bar. I had a red top hat on my head: who knows how it got there.”

  With eager fascination, he ventured beyond Montparnasse to carouse the city’s seedy underworld alongside the budding American novelist Henry Miller, who wrote about his friend in Tropic of Cancer. But Brassaï also sampled the pleasures of the Parisian high life during those early years, retrieving his best suit from the pawnshop whenever he was asked to a concert or a ball. “It did happen that, having spent the night among workers (railroad employees, rail cleaners, loaders at the market) and vagabonds, rou
ghnecks and streetwalkers, I would be invited the next day to a soirée or masked ball of the aristocracy at the salon of Count Etienne de Beaumont or Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles,” he remembered.

  Brassaï’s photos of every aspect of nocturnal Paris would become iconic during the 1930s—the trashmen toiling through the night, the lovers kissing in the shadows, the prostitutes strutting with their hands on their hips, or the girls backstage at the Folies Bergère. “Sometimes, impelled by an inexplicable desire, I would even enter some dilapidated house, climb to the top of its dark staircase, knock on a door and startle strangers awake, just to find out what unsuspected face Paris might show me from their window,” he later admitted.

  In the mid-1920s, however, he had yet to find his future calling, or to make the link between his love of the night and his artistic vision. He was having too much fun. Around two in the morning, “all the night creatures driven out of the cafés are scurrying around in panic,” Brassaï wrote. They asked one another: Is the Rotonde still open? Is the Dôme? “I have been drawn too deeply into the magnetic atmosphere of the cafés and, whether I wanted it or not, I would always stumble into someone and end up spending my nights in the cafés instead of doing my work,” he wrote to his parents. In an effort to get serious, he moved a whole “eight minutes from the Rotonde” in 1925.

  Distractions that winter included the beautiful South American Oliva, who tucked a bouquet of violets into his buttonhole on the night they met. “It’s two o’clock in the morning. We have had three fines à l’eau. Taxi. Oliva is taking charge,” he wrote to his parents, relating one of their escapades. They danced in a Montmartre nightclub, didn’t have enough money to pay their bill, and tumbled into a hansom cab to head “home to Montparnasse,” Brassaï wrote. “It is dawn. Oliva is in my lap, intoxicated by champagne and cognac. She’s tearing at my hair like a kitten.… Horse and coachman are dozing off.…” Few wrung more pleasure from the Parisian night.

  For thousands of years, writers have described their sleeping hours as divided into two parts: “dead sleep” and “morning sleep.” The dreamy span between the sleeps was known as dorveille, a period of quiet wakefulness that sailed along the perimeter of heightened semiconsciousness. (The word combines the French dormir, “to sleep,” and reveiller, “to wake.”) Researchers say that only after the advent of gas lighting did humans condense their sleep into one uninterrupted span. However, in contemporary sleep studies, once a person is deprived of artificial light for several weeks, he or she naturally slips right back into the old two-sleeps pattern, and the dorveille emerges once again.

  Dorveille was a time for hatching new ideas, maybe smoking a pipe or tending the fire, though most people probably never left their beds. Often, they would write. In 1769, an English inventor advertised a gadget he called the “Nocturnal Remembrancer,” a paper tablet inside a wooden box with a slit in it to guide a pen across paper in the dark, enabling “philosophers, statesmen, poets, divines and every person of genius, business or reflection” to preserve the revelations that came to them during dorveille.

  It was “one hour to be spent in thought, with the mind’s eye half shut,” as American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) explained in 1835. As the clock strikes two, “yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; tomorrow has not yet emerged from the future,” he enthused. “You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the wayside to take breath.”

  From her Geneva home, Henriette d’Angeville (1794–1871) could see the tantalizing slopes of Mont Blanc in the distance. “It seemed to me that I was in exile in Geneva and that my real country was on that snowy, golden peak that crowned the mountains. I was late for my wedding, for my marriage … for the delicious hour when I could lie on his summit,” she wrote. “Oh! When will it come!” The moment came at two o’clock one still-dark autumn morning in 1838, when the forty-four-year-old aristocrat’s guides woke her to begin the party’s final ascent of the mountain.

  During the previous summer, d’Angeville had prepared by climbing lesser peaks, but when she announced her plan to scale Mont Blanc, “a general outcry of amazement and disapproval” went up among her neighbors. A guidebook declared that curious adventurers who scaled the mountain were “hardly justified in risking the lives of the guides.” “It is a somewhat remarkable fact,” the text went on, “that a large proportion of those who have made the ascent have been persons of unsound mind.”

  D’Angeville didn’t let such sentiments dampen her resolve. “Each of us must arrange his life according to his moral or intellectual inclinations,” she offered. The only other woman known to have accomplished the feat was a young maidservant, Maria Paradis, who was barely conscious when her companions dragged her to the top. At the foot of the mountain, the citizens in Chamonix laid bets on whether d’Angeville would make it, and as she climbed, every telescope in town was trained on the sight.

  What they would have seen was a woman wearing a plaid bonnet trimmed with fur, a black feather boa, a fur-lined cape, and a voluminous Scotch plaid jacket and matching trousers—her ridiculously eccentric self-designed getup. She slowly made her way through the snow with thirteen guides and porters. Among their provisions for the three-day trek were two legs of mutton, two sides of veal, twenty-four roast chickens, six loaves of bread, and eighteen bottles of wine, along with cognac, sugar, lemons, chocolate, prunes, blancmange, lemonade, and bouillon. In her own luggage, d’Angeville packed cucumber face cream, a small vial of eau de cologne, and “an enormous fan in case I had to be given air.”

  At first the guides had to warn her to slow down, advising the intrepid lady to “walk as if you did not want to reach the top.” But on the last day, after nearly twelve hours of climbing, and as they passed 13,000 feet and faced a steep 354-step ice staircase leading to the snowfields at the peak, she felt a “heaviness in the eyes” that soon overpowered her with a need for sleep. After every twenty steps, she’d slump down into the snow to rest. The guides would wake her after a minute or two, and then they pressed on together. She felt she’d suffocate. Her limbs became weak. She suffered a raging thirst and heart palpitations. “Look at her, asleep again,” one guide complained. “This is the last lady I take up Mont Blanc.” Finally, the men offered to carry her the rest of the way. With that, d’Angeville sprang back to life. “I will not be carried!” she cried, summoning all her pluck and moving steadily once again until reaching the summit. “The fear of such a humiliation gave me renewed strength, and I outdid myself.”

  At 15,771 feet she released a carrier pigeon and sat down again to write letters to her friends, “to serve as a constant reminder that I had not forgotten them even on the summit of Mont Blanc.” Then she took a moment to marvel at the serene spectacle spread all around her. “This astonishing sky,” she wrote, “the desolation of colossal mountains, the fretwork of clouds and grey peaks, the eternal snows, the solemn silence of the wastes, the absence of any sound, any living being, any vegetation, and above all of a great city that might recall the world of men: all combined to conjure up an image of a new world or to transport the spectator to primitive times.”

  ARRIVING IN GUADELOUPE IN THE AUTUMN of 1493, explorer Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) became the first European to try a pineapple, which he described as a melon, though “of much sweeter and delightful aroma and flavor.” It was the beginning of an intercontinental love affair. Explorers rushed their ships home from the New World to bring the fruit to eager patrons. King Ferdinand of Spain deemed pineapple the best thing he had ever tasted. Spanish explorer Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes (1478–1557) scrawled out page after page singing the fruit’s praises. “I do not suppose that there is in the whole world any other of so exquisite and lovely appearance,” he wrote in 1535. “My pen and my words cannot depict such exceptional qualiti
es, nor appropriately blazon this fruit so as to particularize the case fully and satisfactorily, without the brush or the sketch.”

  During the late seventeenth century, top European gardeners experimented with growing the fruit in specialized steamy hothouses, called “pineries.” Building the glasshouses and feeding the stoves needed to warm the plants, which bore fruit only in the second or third year, was an enormous expense—so much so that the pineapple became a status symbol. By 1730, English brokers rented out pineapples to ambitious party hosts to display as table centerpieces.

  But the pineapple wasn’t Europe’s first superstar fruit. Its exotic predecessor, the orange tree, was grown in Italy from the Renaissance onward, and during the late seventeenth century was cultivated in opulent European orangeries, like the one at Versailles, which was stocked with orange and lemon trees, jasmine shrubs, pomegranates, oleanders, and tropical birds. England’s Queen Anne (1665–1714), enchanted by the overgrown spectacle of her greenhouse at Kensington Palace, regularly ate supper there in the early 1700s. Other monarchs had grandiose theaters or ballrooms attached to their orangeries. King Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) liked to stroll through an entire town, a “fairy world” of glass and iron he’d commissioned, which included a church built to house his orange trees, palm trees, and tropical plants. Bavaria’s King Ludwig II (1845–1886) boasted a winter garden brimming with incredible foliage from far-flung places, a small waterfall, a tiny lake rippling with artificially made waves, and, along one wall, painted vistas of the Himalaya. Under a blue silk tent covered in roses, he dined there one evening with a Spanish infanta while a hidden choir sang.