Night

In the opening story of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, Etienne Fourre, chief of the Maquisard Brotherhood, therefore French representative in the Supreme Council of United Free Europe, looks past his Commandant into night. 

In Anderson's Technic History, the Long Night after the Fall of the Terran Empire is delayed but not prevented. 

OK. Night is coming. One passage more than any other has directly addressed me in the works of CS Lewis. The author as viewpoint character and first person narrator inadvertently enters the mind of a young woman where he hears:

"...a voice at whose sound my bones turned to water: 'Child, child, child, let me in before the night comes.'

'Before the night comes'..."

-CS Lewis, "The Shoddy Lands" IN Lewis, The Dark Tower and other stories (London, 1983), pp. 104-111 AT p. 110.

Personified reality penetrates the "shoddy lands" of a closed mind. Before meditating each morning, I ask, "Please help me to let you in..."

Meanwhile, for Fourre, for Flandry, for all of us, the night approaches.