Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Night, for Maugham, is less a time of day than a moral atmosphere - and the city has ruined it. The sentence pivots on an inversion: the countryside treats darkness as a companion, the city treats it as an enemy, even though the city is the place that claims mastery through light. That tension is the point. Urban illumination isn't comfort here; it's a defensive glare, an anxious insistence that everything must be visible to be controlled. The brighter the blaze, the more suspect the dark becomes.

Maugham's craft is in how quickly he turns description into psychology. "Friendly and familiar" sits in the mouth like folklore: night as a shared, old rhythm. Then the city arrives with a new vocabulary - "unnatural, hostile and menacing" - as if electric light has rewritten human instincts. Darkness becomes not absence but predator, "a monstrous vulture" circling above the artificial day the city manufactures. A vulture doesn't attack immediately; it waits. That choice smuggles in dread about what the city represses: loneliness, crime, poverty, the breakdown of community - all the things light can display without actually solving.

As a playwright, Maugham knows how to stage menace. He gives the night a role, an entrance, a costume (hovering wings), and a motive (biding its time). The subtext is metropolitan fragility: civilization as performance, always at risk of going dark, always sensing the audience could turn on it. The countryside makes peace with limits; the city, addicted to brightness, breeds a fear it can't outshine.