The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox?

This line comes from Sir Thomas Browne’s meditative, baroque prose work *Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial* (1658), written in response to the discovery of ancient funerary urns in Norfolk. Browne uses the archaeological find as a springboard for reflections on mortality, oblivion, and the vastness of historical time. In that setting, he repeatedly contrasts the brevity and fragility of human remembrance with the long “night” of time in which most lives and civilizations are swallowed up. The remark about the “equinox” arises as part of his larger argument that we cannot reliably locate a balanced midpoint between what is remembered and what is lost.

Browne imagines time as a cycle of day and night, but insists that darkness dominates: far more of the past is unknown, forgotten, or irrecoverable than is illuminated by records and memory. The rhetorical question—“who knows when was the equinox?”—presses the point that we cannot even identify the moment when knowledge and oblivion were in balance, if such a moment ever existed. The line underscores Browne’s skepticism about historical certainty and posthumous fame: what survives is accidental and partial, while the greater portion of human experience lies in obscurity. It is both a memento mori and a critique of confidence in historical narratives.