Preview
Copywork
About This Passage
This expanded passage articulates Dahl's quietest theory of perception in a single sentence at the end. The world has two halves, the day belongs to the loud half, the night to the quiet one, and most of what is worth knowing happens in the second half — which means it is invisible to anyone whose habits keep them asleep when the worth-knowing happens. The observation is doing serious work. It implies that conventional alertness (being awake when the world expects you to be awake, asleep when the world expects you to be asleep) is itself a form of blindness, because the times most people are awake are the times the most superficial things happen. The depth happens at the edges, and only the people who are awake at the edges get to see it. This is closer to the wisdom of the contemplative traditions on the importance of vigil and silence than to the conventional account of why children should sleep through the night, and Dahl is delivering it through the voice of a small orphan in a children's adventure novel.
It was the witching hour, Sophie knew. The witching hour was that special time of night when every grownup and every child was in deep deep sleep, and dark things came out of hiding and had the world ...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of the chapter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment and explain why it matters to the book as a whole.
Discussion Questions
- Dahl's narrator implies that conventional alertness (being awake on the schedule society expects) is itself a form of blindness, because the most important things happen at the edges that conventional schedules ignore. Is this a serious epistemological claim or a romantic exaggeration? How does it relate to the contemplative traditions on vigil and silence, and to the contemporary literature on the importance of unstructured time for creative and moral development?
- Locate the precise sentences in which Dahl articulates his theory of perception (the world's two halves, the worth-knowing things happening at the edges, the invisibility to those who sleep through them). Is the theory delivered through Sophie's consciousness or through external narrative commentary? What does the choice of delivery mode reveal about how Dahl wants the theory to land?
+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide
Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A period of staying awake when others sleep, with a long history in religious and contemplative traditions where the watchful state is treated as a privileged condition for perception
Item 2
The capacity to notice phenomena that occur at the borders between distinct domains, where the things most easily missed by conventional attention tend to congregate
Item 3
The category of perceptions and recognitions that children sometimes have access to and adults often lose, debated as either real perceptual capacity or romantic projection
+ 3 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
+ 7 more questions in the complete study guide
Get the complete study guide — free
Sign up and get your first book with every chapter included. Copywork, discussion questions, vocabulary, and critical thinking.
Sign up free