Night Song

The essay Night Song has a strong focus on scent and sound for building its scenes, due to the blindness of the author. The fact that these senses convey the memories of the author so vividly is the most interesting part of the essay, for me. I see the essay as being primarily about memory, since the beginning of the essay is detailing the author's first memories of sound, which are also his first memories in general. The end of the essay also strikes me as being focused on memory, with it's rhythmic restlessness. It's as if the essay is the catalogue of thoughts the author experienced during a sleepless night. I can imagine laying in bed myself, floating through memories with very little thematic relation, finding each one profoundly important and needing of my attention, despite the fact that they have no pertinent relation to falling asleep or even to the issues that are keeping me awake. That the recounted memories seem so dense is all the more impressive for their lack of visual description. I imagine scenes, complete with visuals, throughout the essay, but I know that my visual interpretation must be extracted from the mood of the writing, the language and syntax, as much as from the actual description. There's a melancholy and an almost surreal feeling I take away from the piece. The way the final paragraph becomes choppier and choppier, perhaps loosing the thread of memories as sleep moves in, is chilling in a way. The scenes throughout the novel have a certain wandering juxtaposition to their collection. They aren't even disconnected images, though, but rather disconnected sounds and smells and feelings. I can imagine the way the author might feel, laying in bed at night while scents and noises wash over him in a series of waves, in the same way that my own restless mind jumps from images of old friends, pets, houses, toys, books, words, to scenes, seemingly complete in their sensory stimulations, of the mundane and the seemingly minor. I wonder a bit at what the essay's point might be, what message it might be striving towards, besides the function of memory, but I'm so enthralled with the language, and especially with the rhythm of the piece, that by the end I don't care.