Reaction Paper: Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall"

Familiarity has a strange effect on human perception and appreciation. We take the beauty of things like the night sky and the stars for granted, simply because we have lived with them all our lives.  This is precisely why Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” is so haunting: it opens our eyes to the possibility that what we consider commonplace and mundane may drive others to unbearable joy… or insanity.

In “Nightfall”, we are exposed to a world bathed in eternal sunlight, to which the idea of darkness is unimaginable and insufferable. Yet what interests me about the plot is that it is not darkness per se that the characters fear, but rather the element of the unknown represented by it. Clearly, there is nothing biological about the darkness that drives people mad. It is simply that they are so familiar to light that they cannot understand what darkness is; thus a world of darkness is the ultimate unknown, the ultimate nightmare. This isn’t limited to the Asimov’s fictional world, however. In everyday life, we see how things like the future, death, and even love can create so much fear in people precisely because they are unpredictable and unknown. Like the cults in the story, we create theories, superstitions, even religions to explain things like the afterlife and the future because we need some sort of mechanism to process this great “unknown-ness”; our minds might be, in a certain way, incapable of comprehending such huge, unfamiliar ideas. Without such mechanisms to create that sort of familiarity, we would probably go insane as well.

At the end of the day, familiarity may act as a blinder to us, preventing us from realizing the true depth and wonder of the world around us, but perhaps it is a necessary blinder. Without the ability to render our world mundane and mentally palatable, we would not be able to live life as usual. That’s why stories like “Nightfall” are so important; they allow us to momentarily disconnect ourselves from these blinders and view our ordinary (and perhaps extraordinary) world through a much more wonderful and terrible perspective, while letting us draw back into the ordinary light of day after closing the page.

Marco Del Valle
2013-20474