View source for The warm, soft dark of night

{{a|otto|{{image|Der Teufel|png|''Devil is in the Detail but God is in the Gaps'', {{vsr|1875}}}}}}{{drop|O|ne of the}} manifold idioms that flowed from the verbose quill of that tedious Austrian plowright {{Otto}} and buried themselves directly into the inflated bowels of the English literary canon.

From {{dsh}}, which he is supposed to have penned between delirious episodes as he lay dying of dengue fever in a filthy sanitorium in old Mandalay, {{buchstein}} invites us to consider the “warm, soft dark of night” — purblind, agitated, unbounded, sweaty and feverish — in which we commonly make the choices that decide our fate. A place and time to be contrasted with “the cold hard light of day” — a social configuration that never prevails at the time of any crux, when one would like it, but inevitably follows a leisurely time later, at which point we, and those we know and from whom we would ask respect, can calmly assess in hindsight the enormity of our actions.

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{{dsh warm soft dark of night}}}}

{{C|Otto Büchstein}}