ABSTRACT
Night is a void and indicative of death and language, poetry is a way out of all this "evil". The metaphysics of night in Mallarme is not this religious night, this Augustinian night given its moral overtones and Manichean sensibility. In Goethe's novel, Elective Affinities, read as a parable, much of the subterranean action, of the relations beneath the surface conventions of society and normality, went on at night. At night our true formlessness asserts itself, our elective affinities and inner group bear our true reality. In the night we can become one, even physically. Artists know this night, therefore, not because they are Romantic, but because it is truth. The metaphysics of night is not a kind of "mysticism". Music is not mystical, nor is it intellectual; and it is music that attunes us to the truths of the metaphysics of night.
