Midnight

On New Year's Day of 2025, I got a new watch in Lidl. It was part of my New Year's resolutions. I wanted to spend less time looking at screens, and thought having a watch would remove one excuse to keep checking my phone. It cost ten euro, and I never expected it to keep ticking along as long as it has.

As you can see from the blurry photo above, my watch had a bit of a mishap recently. The number twelve has fallen from its place at the top of the dial. One of the digits is trapped at the centre of the dial, another is stuck to the glass. I have no idea how this happened, but it was only a couple of days ago. It hasn't affected the watch's mechanism so far.

Strangely enough, I had already been thinking about the word "midnight" before this happened. Spooky, right?

"Midnight" has a strange glamour to it. Considered objectively, it's no big deal. It's simply the moment when one calendar day is succeeded by another. 

But the word can always be counted on to deliver something of a frisson, which means it often appears in the titles of songs, films and other works.

Midnight suggests all sorts of things; spookiness, danger, solemnity, pensiveness, anticipation...

I keep a spreadsheet of all the movies I watch, and all the movies I can remember ever having watched. (Pretty nerdy, I know.) It currently lists 1346 films, but the word "midnight" only returned two hits; one for Midnight Sting (1992), the other for Midnight Sky (2020), neither of them films that have lingered in my memory. (Indeed, I can't remember anything at all about the latter.)

There are lots of well-known films with the word "midnight" in the title, even though I haven't seen any of them: Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Express, Midnight in Paris, Chimes at Midnight.

(I love the phrase "chimes at midnight". It comes, as you probably know, from Shakespeare: "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow". Meaning: we've lived it up.)

There used to be a fast-food restaurant in Dublin called Midnight Express, though I think it changed its name recently. (I've often wondered if naming a business after an artistic work has any copyright implications.)

There must be tonnes of folklore about midnight, although the only snippet that comes to mind is Cinderella having to leave the ball by midnight-- and in all honesty, I'm not even too clear about that. I don't want to look any of it up, because right now I'm interested in the popular associations that hang around the word "midnight", and I don't think most people would know any more of the folkore than I do.

I can think of at least one book I've read with "midnight" in the title. Four Past Midnight was actually the first Stephen King book I ever read. As you can probably guess, it's a collection of four stories. One of them, "The Sun Dog", actually spooked me. (It features a camera which takes inexplicable images of a scary dog coming closer and closer.) I started reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie but gave it up after a few pages. (The children of the title are Indians born at the moment of Indian independence.)

I've always loved the title Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, though I have no idea what the book is about.

The word "midnight" must feature extensively in poetry, I'm sure. But the only instance I can think of right now is the first line of "The Raven" by Poe: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.."

I'm sure there are hundreds of songs with the word "midnight" in the title. My favourite is Midnight Confessions by the Grass Roots, which I came across on the excellent Jackie Brown soundtrack.

There's a sense of magic about midnight, I think it's fair to say. In this regard, I always recall a memory from my last year in primary school. My class were competing in a drama competition and we were staying in Ennis overnight. I can remember us sitting in the l

obby of a hotel (although we weren't actually staying in the hotel). I made a reference to tomorrow, and another kid said: "It is tomorrow". So it was obviously past midnight. I was very impressed by this remark and I still think about it all these years later. I guess midnight is a "liminal space", a concept that has been much discussed in recent times.

I think we all have a sense of anxiety about disenchantment these days. And by "these days", I mean for since the beginning of modernity. We are frightened of time and space becoming simply a grid, a contiuum. And we reach out for times and places that seem to have a soul of their own, an enchantment. It's nice to think that one of them comes every twenty-four hours.