I loved reading this just after waking up on a gray day, feeling the night recede around me. I wonder if the Spanish interest in poems and songs about the night isn’t the corollary of the alba, or poems and songs of the Dawn, which most often are about lovers (usually illicit lovers) having to part at daybreak? The song you posted (a beauty,btw) seems to be about a man or woman who is waiting for the arrival of their “friend” at night…a song about disappointed love? I’ve also read that in earlier times, when interior lighting was a burning candle, people often went to bed after it got dark; I winter months, when the night is over 12 hours long, this was tricky, and it was not unusual for people to get up in the middle of the night, and attempt to do things, before going back to sleep. Your society of people who get together at 3 a.m. seems like a throw back to those earlier habits.
Thank you for including the excellent term "lucubrate," which I will definitely need to use more often in my vocabulary-!!
I loved reading this just after waking up on a gray day, feeling the night recede around me. I wonder if the Spanish interest in poems and songs about the night isn’t the corollary of the alba, or poems and songs of the Dawn, which most often are about lovers (usually illicit lovers) having to part at daybreak? The song you posted (a beauty,btw) seems to be about a man or woman who is waiting for the arrival of their “friend” at night…a song about disappointed love? I’ve also read that in earlier times, when interior lighting was a burning candle, people often went to bed after it got dark; I winter months, when the night is over 12 hours long, this was tricky, and it was not unusual for people to get up in the middle of the night, and attempt to do things, before going back to sleep. Your society of people who get together at 3 a.m. seems like a throw back to those earlier habits.