In ‘The Nocturnal Visitor’, the third instalment of Alessandro Spina's (né Bāsilī Shafiq Khuzām, 1927–2013) I confini dell’ombra (2006; The Confines of the Shadow, 2012), the venerable judge Sheikh Hassan is immersed in history books, whose vicissitudes he sees reflected in the ruins dotting his native Cyrenaican valley.3 Imagining bygone kingdoms, ‘richer than Iram of the Pillars’, alongside the crumbling ruins they leave behind, the Sheikh envisions the valley as a dramatisation of North African historiographer Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddima (1377 CE), and its exposition of the ‘foundation of a city, its flowering and subsequent decay’. Superfluity, Ibn Khaldūn tells him, is the cause of this decay, while the secret of Bedouin society lies in its moderation, preserving group solidarity (ʿaṣabiyya).

Within Spina's sprawling epic of twentieth-century Libya, Ibn Khaldūn’s words set national history within a pan-historic perspective, spanning Ottomans, Italians and, finally, Jamahiriyya, a culmination of ‘superfluity’, but also an unparalleled break with the past, as people and power are drawn irrevocably from the nomadic (badawī) to the settled (ḥaḍar). As cautionary ‘signs’ (āyāt), the valley's ruins further evoke Walter Benjamin's reading of the past as ‘natural history’ (naturgeschichte), an accumulation of melancholy traces, cast from the symbolic systems that once conferred meaning upon them, and reabsorbed into natural time. This history, as Pick suggests, ‘sweeps human legibility into history's catastrophic pileup’, evoking ‘mutability, transience and decay – the passing of the historical into ahuman nature, the passing of man into nonman, of soul into matter’. Natural history, as Pick suggests, represents the sobering dissipation of human cultural meaning into the material and transient, and of human epochs into organic cycles of growth and decay, setting nation and civilisation within a wider, creaturely whole.