The Last Days of Night

“‘Mr. Cravath, there’s a war on, in case you haven’t noticed. Within the next few years, someone is going to build an electrical system that lights this entire nation.’” 

This moment in history is unlike any other. This excerpt attempts to impress upon Paul the historical gravity of the situation in which he is a key player. It also serves to introduce war as a symbol for the race between inventors, later called “The Current War.” 

“All stories are love stories. Paul remembered someone famous saying that. Thomas Edison’s would be no exception. All men get the things they love. The tragedy of some men is not that they are denied, but that they wish they’d loved something else.” 

This quote foreshadows the ultimate lesson Paul learns through the novel. It urges the reader to pay attention to what each character’s motivations are and foreshadows the change in Paul’s motivation at the end of the novel. 

“To be a stranger in the place of your coming-of-age, to be an old man to your peers but a young man to your partners—these were the signs of generational displacement endemic to the young and successful.”

Paul strongly identifies himself as a prodigy. Here, he laments the liminality that this identity occupies. It also reveals Paul’s still developing maturity. Though very confident in his abilities, he’ll find later in the novel that he should rely on help from his associates. 

“Tesla belonged to no one.” 

In this quote, the journalist Thomas Martin’s body language tries to stake claim to Tesla. In a reflection of the capitalism theme, the commoditizing of people, specifically scientists and engineers, is a large part of modern life. However, a man like Tesla, who doesn’t subscribe to capitalistic aims, cannot be bought or owned. 

“What creator did not live to see his creations brought to life?” 

In Paul’s mind, one invents something with the act of physically creating it. Tesla, on the other hand, sees creation from a far vaster perspective. He knows the limits of the material world; thus, his creativity operates in a way transcendent of space and time. He doesn’t care for the end product, just the idea.

“‘Kid…your courts, your lawsuits…If you only understood. The promise of A/C is so much greater than that.’” 

Paul’s world is extremely specific to the zone of law, which makes him a good lawyer. However, the concepts they are dealing with in the lawsuit, like alternating current, extend far beyond law’s myopic focus. This passage also hints at Paul’s motivator: Rather than seeing how electricity will shape the future, he thinks only of winning.

“He found the city noisy, filthy, unpleasant. He found the conditions of the Jews, confined as they were to their Lower East Side tenements, to be appalling. He found the treatment of the Negroes in the Tenderloin to be even worse. Wasn’t typhoid a concern?” 

When Erastus, Paul’s father, visits New York, his perspective grants the reader a view through the lens of human rights. Paul’s glamorous idea of wealthy New York is suddenly stripped away, bringing to the forefront the reality of racism, public health, and poverty.

“‘Electricity lends itself poorly to metaphor. Gravity, centripetal motion—much easier phenomena to explain by way of literary analogy. If Newton worked in poetry, we’re left to toil in prose.’” 

The language people use to describe the new phenomenon of electricity fumbles to describe the indescribable. This quote is also a metaphor for old discoveries being more poetic than electricity. The modern age is not poetic, according to Paul.

“‘Buildings are ephemeral. It is ideas that last forever.’” 

This quote further explicates Tesla’s perspective on the material world versus the intangible. He has a keen awareness of his own brilliance, and the deep impact his ideas will have on future human life.

“Knowing the difference between right and wrong sometimes did not serve to clarify much of anything. Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn’t mean he’ll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it.” 

Throughout the novel, Paul makes big decisions. As many turn out to be mistakes (like his contract mistake with Tesla’s royalties), Paul increasingly questions the meaning and role of morality within his linear narrative. This quote refers to his religious father supporting the Union army during the Civil War despite his pacifism, prompting Paul to reflect on his own moral ambiguity.

“On future evenings, Tesla would describe further visions. There was talk of horned beetles. Then there were bloody rivers and a solar eclipse of infinite length. Eventually he described an undead army and a colony of ants whose bodies were comprised of particles from distant stars. As the days passed, Tesla’s descriptions grew more verbose. He invariably spoke as if these terrible sights were not dreams, but scenes before his waking eyes.” 

This passage artistically describes Tesla’s creative mindset. It is overwhelmingly artistic compared to the scientific and business minds of Edison and Westinghouse. The contrast is otherworldly and highly literary, proving false the idea that electricity can’t be described poetically.

“Paul had long felt that the Columbia campus must have been designed from a place of deep anxiety. Its intricate Gothic facades had been built to give the impression of the Old World, curving stone conveying the European Enlightenment and the storied schools of England and France. Thought Columbia was one of the oldest universities in the country, it still had its baby fat. The affliction of insecurity that plagued the Wall Street nouveaux riches was even worse among the midtown academy. Bankers all wanted to be princes. Professors all wanted to be Martin Luther.” 

Paul’s perspective on Columbia’s architecture is a deeper reflection of American intellectual insecurity. As a young nation, the U.S. doesn’t have the profound intellectual history of its European ancestors. Europe’s model of success will not be America’s, yet the new, post-colonial country will try to imitate it.

“For over a year, the name Edison had haunted Paul’s days. He had met Thomas Edison only once, and yet the inventor was ever present in his thoughts. His daily life was a groove in the invisible orbit around Edison’s solar mass. Practically every slip of paper that crossed Paul’s desk bore Edison’s name. Edison’s presence dominated the work of Paul’s waking hours and often his sleeping ones. He had spent many times more hours dreaming of Edison than speaking to him.” 

This passage reflects more than Paul’s deep obsession with Edison. Edison holds a mirror to Paul like Narcissus, who eventually deems himself, rather than super villain Edison, the villain of his own story. Paul is myopically fixated upon Edison, unaware that he is actually analyzing and learning about himself.

“‘I am guilty as sin. Yes, Mr. Cravath, I sold the light bulb. Americans did not have them. Then they did. Then they bought them by the trainload, and is there any part of you that doubts you owe all of that to me? Is there any part of you that believes that without me Americans would have electrical light inside their homes? Of course not. You want the light but you don’t want to know how I made it. You privilege the effect, but you’re horrified that someone had actually to cause it.’” 

Edison lectures Paul about his undeniable influence. He recognizes Paul’s myopic tendency within his case, and his refusal to acknowledge that Edison truly is an inventor, even if he is also a foe. Further, Edison’s own command of the legalities of his patent and the filament materials best Paul at his own game. Edison ultimately deflects the argument, attacking Paul’s ignorance and winning the deposition.  

“The slanted wooden roof had worn since Paul had last laid eyes on it. The whole house seemed to have fallen into a state of comfortable dishabille. Neither Erastus nor Ruth would demand thicker windows or sturdier front steps until one of those parts had completely broken. In Paul’s childhood, no one wanted for anything they truly needed, but no one had anything they might merely want.”

This passage uses the architecture of his childhood farm to illustrate Paul’s roots and the stark difference between his childhood home life and his professional life in prestigious New York. His parents’ spiritual simplicity provides a bedrock for Paul’s morality. Although he makes mistakes, he eventually learns what is truly important in his life: those he loves.

“‘Nikola Tesla arrived in Manhattan with, what, a few nickels in his pocket? He was homeless. He had no job, no connections, no family or friends to rely on. Do you know what he had?’ She gestured to her skull. ‘His mind. It was his very otherworldliness that made him what he is. He did not become the most famous inventor this side of Thomas Edison by playing the game so well—he did it by refusing to play at all. And as someone who’s played awfully well myself, I respect him for it. I’d very much like to live in a world that doesn’t see people like him eaten alive.’” 

Agnes reflects on Tesla’s ethereality in comparison to the “game players” that surround her life on the Manhattan scene. Agnes’s game is her fake identity, based on the illusion of wealth enabled by a stolen dress and diamonds. Tesla’s immaterial concerns highlight Agnes’s longing for a life without constant fear of being discovered as a fraud. 

“The life that Agnes had won became so full that she believed it herself. She had not succumbed to cynicism; she had grown into the woman she’d dreamed. The talent of Agnes Huntington, the things that made her a star of the stage and a belle of the ball, were wholly real. No one else had made her who she was. And though she’d lied to get there, it was not the lies that echoed from the walls of the Metropolitan Opera House every night. It was the truth.” 

In this passage, Paul sees Agnes for her true inner self, reconciling this with the outward expression of fame and success that the public perceives of her. Paul’s rejection of Agnes’s lies and utter acceptance of her legitimacy is in stark contrast to his perceptions of Edison’s and Westinghouse’s lies. This illustrates the examination of moral ambiguity throughout the novel.

“He looked up at the clear night sky. His eyes naturally traced the constellations among the bright stars. Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia. He’d been spotting their hidden shapes from this very place since he was a boy. Yet the irony of constellations was that their shapes were, but narratives imposed by an active mind. The brightest design among the heavens was in truth only what you imagined it to be. Glance across the stars differently, and the figures they formed were suddenly different as well. Blink once and you could draw the lines between them into anything you chose.” 

Paul rejects the idea of fate. A constant writer of his own narrative, he rejects the narratives imposed by others. He considers metaphysical interpretation to be a form of this alien narration. Thus, he ascribes no meaning to the constellations, seeing them from a purely scientific perspective. Paul’s philosophy is to write his own narrative using his freedom of will and intentioned perspective.

“The irony was not lost on Paul that he felt most himself here, on the train, at play under a false name. Agnes seemed to feel the same way. Agnes Gouge pretending to be Agnes Huntington pretending to be Alice Boone. Paul was pretending to be someone who was permitted to love her. They were the king and queen of the first-class dining car.”

Pretending to be a married couple on the train, Paul’s grip on moral ambiguity is heavily influenced by his emotional state. When it comes to Agnes, a deeper truth appears, returning Paul to his childhood moral bedrock. If all stories are love stories, then Paul’s story is ultimately about Agnes. Still, prestige is undeniably important to Paul, as is evidenced in the last line of this excerpt.

“‘The future you’re fighting for, it belongs to the moneymen. Not the inventors. Leave the former to their well-appointed hell. And tell the latter to join me here, where only genius matters, and only wonder thrives.’” 

This quote illustrates Bell’s holistic and transcendent perspective, reminiscent of Tesla’s artistic approach to scientific creation. Bell lives in the simple present, devoting his energy to the things that bring him inspiration and wonder. This is an example of Paul’s childhood porch musing about the forging of one’s own path and not succumbing to a fate written out by others.

“‘The most dangerous enemy that Thomas Edison will ever face is Thomas Edison. And even after all this time, he still hasn’t learned his lesson.’” 

Edison is portrayed as a super villain throughout the novel. It naturally follows that the only person powerful enough to defeat such a villain, is the villain himself. Out of everything awful he’s done; Edison’s crucial flaw is his own narcissism.

“Tesla was happiest when he was working. Westinghouse was happiest when he’d finished. Edison would be happiest only when he’d won.” 

This quote refers back to the first chapter, when Paul foreshadows that all stories are love stories. Tesla loves the act of creation, Westinghouse loves the product, and Edison loves the glory. 

“It was nice to be reminded that of all the fantastic things he’d seen in his life, of all the man-made inventions he’d witnessed, none held the power that Niagara did. Or rather that even Westinghouse’s perfect current depended upon nature for its power. The God of Paul’s father still powered the devices of Paul’s client.” 

Within this time of exponential scientific discovery, the energy and power of the natural world still dwarfs human accomplishment. This passage recalls the first chapter’s description of wonder at seeing electric light for the first time. It again connects the experience to ancient peoples’ interpretations of natural phenomena as divine. The cycle of history and energy is a continuation, framing the war of the currents within a larger context of energy.