How Bourgeois was Faust?

But at night the atmosphere changes. Sounds become muffled, thoughts grow louder. "Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva take flight," noted Walter Benjamin, quoting Hegel. Time seems closer to that moment halfway between wakefulness and sleep in which the world can be comfortably reimagined. My movements feel unwittingly furtive, my activity secret. I turn into something of a ghost. The books are now the real presence and it is I, their reader, who, through cabalistic rituals of half-glimpsed letters, am summoned up and lured to a certain volume and a certain page.

-from The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel (2008)

Mindful of the shambles of the day,
But mindful, under the blood's drowsy humming,
Of will that gropes for structure; nonetheless
Not unmindful of the madness without,
The madness within - the book of reason
Slammed open, slammed shut

I only know things seem and are not good.

-from Nightwalker by Thomas Kinsella (1968)