Elysian Night

I love the evening, the long night. It's part of why my sleep schedule is awful, but it's my favorite time, precisely because it affords me a peace I never find in the day. It's a magical realm where the moment seems to stretch on for hours, and where the only shadow darker than the night is the one cast by the threat of the coming dawn. For a few hours, no one makes demands of me. There is no anxiety. There is no fear.

I'm not the first to make such remarks. For most people, night is a time when the obligations of the day have been met, and there is nothing left but liesure. The word "liesure" conjures up images of sloth and laziness, but that's not what it really means. Liesure is time that is free, time that may be spent in freedom. Liesure is when you are not at the behest of anyone but your friends and loved ones. Liesure means giving out of compassion and love, not out of obligation or coercion.

What does it say about our world that liesure is demonized and stress-ridden toil is the norm? What does it say about our world that most of our time is not spent in freedom? We talk a great deal about democracy, but democracy does not exist in the workplace. You could even make the argument that we have no democracy at all.

The night is (or at least, traditionally was) the refuge of the working class. In the silence of the night, the gears of capitalism halt. But come the dawn, the roads are clogged by people compelled to suffer, and the buzz of human activity drowns out the beauty of the world. The dirty brown horizon forms, marring the blue behind it. The earth dies just a little more; each day is a prolonged, painful gasp.

But in the night, I can entertain the comforting illusion that the world is still, that the demons of capital are slumbering, that there is peace and stillness at last. Can you imagine a world where the laws of night hold sway forever? Like Elysium, there would be time for contemplation, for stillness, time for the voices of silence to speak to us. There would be time to devote yourself to work that you care about, rather than work you are alienated from. Can you imagine such a world, where all of one's time is spent in liesure, whether at work or at home?

Our life on this beautiful celestial body was always meant to be an endless night, occasionally punctuated by the rising and setting of the sun.

The goal of socialism ought to be the realization of this endless Elysian night.

This is why I am an anarcho-communist, because I have hope that we can live in a world where each and every moment is free.