Still Amazed

Late night summer thoughts

 Oh, the wanderings the mind can do after midnight

         What were you thinking about late last night? You know the time, it’s that fuzzy gray area after we get in bed, turn out the lights and start to drift off but before we actually go to sleep.  People view the night in so many different ways.  For some, the night holds nothing but terror.  For others, it is their favorite time.  A vast amount of songs, poems, stories, plays, and films take place at night or are about night. Or indeed are written at night.  The night inspires creativity, terror, passion, love and secrets, especially during the warm summer months.

We still have vestiges of the awe surrounding nights. For eons we viewed the night with fear, with superstition, with dread, with hope.  There were no security lights, no alarms, and no police cars cruising the neighborhood.  Yet hope also existed, because for all the fear that came with night there was still belief or hope that you would wake up.   

How do you view the night? Personally, I rather enjoy the night.  Long after the sun has gone down, after the birds have quit singing, the phones stopped ringing, and most of the cars are parked in their garages, I’m still awake.  Whether writing, working on-line, reading or, yes, even watching television, I’m still awake with the night.  

The time after daytime

My best thinking comes late at night.  After the house is quiet and my son and daughter are tucked in bed, after the dog is quietly snoring at the side of my chair, after my wife has long since gone to bed, and after the crickets have called it a night and are giving their legs a rest, I’m still awake. 

What am I doing still awake? I’m thinking.  After all, there are so many great things to think about.  And yes, there are also other less great things to think about as well, things like when to get a haircut, what color the next car should be, and whether pepperoni or Canadian bacon is the best topping for a pizza.  But beyond that, there are a few really wonderful things to ponder.  For instance, the other night I got to thinking about the first thing that led to the first higher-level thought.  Okay, maybe that’s not so wonderful, but I thought it was very profound at the time.  And it was interesting, at least to me at 3:30 am.

Scientists who think about these kinds of things (and writers awake late at night) have often thought that fear was what led to speech and higher thought.  For example, one might want, or in fact desperately need, to shout, “Run for your life, dinosaur stampede!” If you can’t put that kind of thought together you can’t say it.

Or perhaps the first thought was something along the lines of, “I’m hungry, and Fred (not his real name) over there has a dinosaur leg with a lot of meat on it.  If I take it away I’ll get the meat.  But then he’ll probably kill me.  Maybe it’s better to just politely ask for some.”  And from that we might have the first rational thought. 

My own thoughts on the first thought

Personally, I think that one of the first thoughts, if not the very first, was nothing more than figuring out how to tie a knot.  I can hear you thinking, “A knot?  Are you crazy?  Why a knot?”  Well, I’m glad you thought that because I, for once at least, have an answer. 

To start with, let’s explore some of the other various possibilities of that “first thought”:

 1. Hunger: Starfish get hungry too.  Are they thinking? Not as far as anyone knows.

 2. Cold: as in “Hey, I’m cold.”  Now this one is possible, because after this thought one might look for a warm place.  But rats do this too.  Now some people might argue that rats in fact do think – at least enough to work their way out of a maze. But hunger (see above) is enough of a motivator for that as well. 

 3. Heat: as in “Whew!” But all animals seek shade, no higher thought required.

 4.  Fear: as in “Help, a tiger is after me! A saber-toothed tiger!”  Now this one, like the stampeding dinosaur we discussed earlier, is a definite possibility.  Fear is one of the great motivators of all time.  And I would probably vote for this one were it not for the fact that other animals get afraid and warn each other of impending problems as well.  Like parakeets.  Enough said.

So that leads us back to the mundane.  And what could be more mundane than tying a knot?  Just look at what early humans would have used knots for:

 * Tying clothes together to make them warmer

 * Making pouches to carry water and food

 * Making bows and arrows to hunt and defend themselves

 * Aiding in delivery of the young and fixing wounds

 * Tying up bad guys so they can’t escape

 * Tethering the family mastodon

There you go, as silly and mundane as it sounds, perhaps nothing more serious, intellectual or intellect-developing than tying a knot was responsible for putting humans on the path to higher thought. 

More than a few billion people worldwide of various faiths will dispute this, of course.  And I don’t necessarily believe it either.  But it was something to think about one quiet night.

 Final summer thought

 I’ll leave you today with the stanza below, words by Charles Tobias and music by Hans Carste and known so memorably from Nat King Cole’s famous rendition of it:

Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
Those days of soda and pretzels and beer
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
You’ll wish that summer could always be here

You’ll wish that summer could always be here
You’ll wish that summer could always be here.

Lyrics from LyricsFreak.com