The Book of Nocturnes: Philosophical Fragments, Matthew Nini, Spring Publications, £17.85

‘I have met many people who wanted to deceive; who wanted to be deceived, no one,’ Saint Augustine writes in his Confessions. While reading Matthew Nini’s book, I began to wonder whether this is really the case. There are countless deceits in his Book of Nocturnes and all are delightful. First of all, consider the subtitle of this book: if you expect philosophy – or rather, what our age thinks ‘philosophy’ is – you’ll certainly be disappointed. But you will not be bored.

The book is philosophical in its original Greek sense, because it is permeated by the ‘love of wisdom’. In an age of chaos and fragmentation, we crave certainty, clarity, and coherence. But Nini offers us no such consolation; only fragments.

Fragments as a literary genre were invented in the final decade of the 18th century by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). At a time when, despite the rise of revolutionary turmoil throughout Europe, classical harmony, completeness and clarity reigned in philosophy, literature and arts, Schlegel and Novalis worked up this new form of intellectual and artistic expression, imbuing it with profound spiritual and philosophical meaning. Fragments were a formal reflection of how they saw the world around them.

We moderns experience the world as disturbingly fragmented and incoherent. We are traumatised by finitude, but we still long for the infinite, and, as Novalis put it, ‘we look for the Unconditioned everywhere and only ever find things’ (Pollen, 1798). A fragment, for Schlegel and Novalis, refers us to the whole by virtue of its incompleteness. It overcomes itself by showing us that we are fallen; it kindles in us the experience of longing. For Schlegel, fragmentary expression, irony, allegory and wit were the principal spiritual exercises, leading us, ultimately, to the realisation that every single thing is an allegory of God.

‘Night thoughts’, which are inaccessible to the rationalistic, logical, conceptual mind, form a continuous thread throughout the European tradition. They begin with the archaic Greek poet Hesiod’s aboriginal chaos, and its first offspring, night, and run from the Greek Church Fathers’ mystical darkness of contemplation, the Dark Night of the Soul of St John of the Cross, the mysteries of nature in Renaissance alchemy, the obscurities of God in the Silesian cobbler-mystic Jacob Boehme, and the premodern science of melancholy, through the psychoanalysis and depth psychology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, all the way to the mythopoeic imagination of Owen Barfield, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

The night into which Nini lures us is not merely for poets, prophets, mystics and madmen. Philosophically minded scientists warn us of the desiccating, impoverishing effect of dumbed-down rationalism. John Vervaeke argues for non-propositional forms of knowing, such as procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowledge, all of which belong to the night. Iain McGilchrist emphasises the crucial importance of right-hemispheric attention, which he calls the holistic, intuitive, and open capacity – night-thinking, which cannot be reduced to left-hemispheric ‘day-thinking’ consisting of clear concepts, logical arguments, and inevitable conclusions.

Nini doesn’t argue for the night, or try to convince us to immerse ourselves into it. He takes us for a walk through the streets of Prague, which no longer seem familiar at night; or invites us to sit with him in a pub in Helsinki in the winter, to chat with an old woman whose Russian is much better than her English; or to enjoy an espresso and a cigarette in Rome with a mechanic whose workshop is across the street; or to wander with feral cats and playing children around the Tarlabaşı neighborhood in Istanbul.

Nini introduces us to many of his night-friends, and we wonder: ‘Are these real people?’ It doesn’t matter, because Nini’s ‘philosophical fragments’ is a sort of novel, too, one that we’d like to read and that Nini would like to write. Someday, perhaps, but not today; for now, we have only fragmentary impressions of train trips to Stuttgart with empty suitcases, long flights from Tokyo, and we never really learn what comes next. In the morning, we wake up.

The Book of Nocturnes is a love song to literature and to the whole of western culture, from Homer and Plato, through Cicero and Macrobius, Marsilio Ficino, Emanuel Swedenborg and the Romantics to Marcel Proust and Rainer Maria Rilke. Even Roland Barthes has a place in this journey through critical editions, illuminated manuscripts, the beginnings of the printing press, dimly lit reading rooms in European libraries, insane conference papers, and mysterious strongboxes hiding dream diaries that have been lost.

Nini’s book is also, in part, about music. The author introduces motifs which are then developed, modified or inverted through the whole book like a fugue’s subject or a sonata’s theme. The style suggests it is meant to be read aloud, like poetry – preferably during sleepless nights. Franz Schubert’s Winterreise is one of the implicit keys to this book, perhaps alongside Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Gustav Mahler’s heartbreaking Kindertotenlieder. Nini invites us to listen to these Romantic songs about the night, winter, and death; about longing and love; about losing what we love the most. You may end up with insomnia, or strange, vivid dreams.