“It is night now, no longer evening but fully night, as in “black as,” if not precisely “dead of.” Evening usually has the afternoon hanging on its coattails, has actual flecks of daylight clinging like lint to its lapels, but night is solitary, aloof, uncompromised, extreme. The safe margins of the day, still faintly visible during eventide, have been erased by night’s dense gum, obscured by its wash of squid squirtings, pajama sauce, and the blue honey manufactured by moths. Is the night a mask, or is day merely night’s prim diguise? Most of us are born in the night, and by night most will die. Night, when tangos play on the nurse’s radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feed, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers “Free at Last” in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir.”

—Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, 1994.