The End of Night
On this pre-dawn November morning, not even the moon shines through the cloud-dense sky. Yet it’s not quite dark. Patches of the trail are lit by streetlamps, and even where it’s not, the ambient light makes puddles shimmer, and the path is, if not clear, at least visible.
In the city, we never experience true dark. At least not when we’re outside. Some twenty-five years ago, in Port Townsend, I stared in wonder at a brilliant sky lit up with a carpet of stars, for I hadn’t seen such a thing since childhood. In Portland, where I lived, the skies had long been dimmed by the city’s night-time glare. I suspect Port Townsend is not as dark as it once was. As Paul Bogard tells us in his book, The End of Night, few truly dark places still exist on Earth.
These days, we keep lamps burning on streets, in businesses and parking lots, on porches, in sports fields, all glowing with a glare brighter than anything humans could have imagined 100 years ago. The light we produce streams beyond the boundaries of city and town, bathing fields far away, obscuring the sky even in tiny hamlets. We have overwhelmed the night.
We evolved to live with darkness. To be healthy, we need the night to be black. Yet night can be scary. Wild animals, wild people, wild thoughts threaten us. Sometimes they harm us. Even when brightly lit, the night hides dangers.
Our Fear of the Shadow Monster
A few years ago, a man living behind us decided to illuminate his backyard. He installed a light timed to turn on at dusk. Every evening, as the dark prepares to settle us for sleep, for slowing down, for contemplation, his lights blare their glow across his lawn, over his six-foot fence, through his neighbors’ windows, and into our homes.
I suspect the light makes him feel secure, maybe even powerful. With it, he keeps bad guys at bay, protects his property and his family. But why light up the back of his property when no one can see through the fence to know if a villain’s sneaking in? Rather than deterring crime, he makes it easier for the criminal to see what she’s doing.
Monsters do lurk in the shadows, but we rarely intimidate them with our electric lights. According to research cited by Bogard, the glare does not make us measurably safer. But the dark has always scared us, and light always made us feel more comfortable, so, like the moths who are attracted to the light, so do we gravitate toward bright, shiny things.
That’s why businesses increase the glare of their lights, because it attracts customers. We’ve grown so used to brightness, we now require greater and greater levels of illumination to feel safe and in control. It’s a little like an addiction. The more we have, the more we need.
The Dark Side of Light
Yet that nighttime glow eats away at our reflective time, our silent time, our dream time. The streams of light we shoot into the atmosphere have disoriented animals and insects. The constant glare disrupts their seasonal migrations and breeding cycles. Being animals ourselves, we humans are surely no less affected. We just do a better job of pretending we’re fine.
For instance, we’ve long known that night-shift workers suffer multiple ailments. They have higher rates of obesity, heart disease, miscarriage, depression, and substance abuse than those who work days. But we daytime workers get sick because we enjoy staying up late, hanging out in rooms lit by electric lights, whether we’re reading, cooking, sewing, playing computer games, or even dancing late into the night. We sleep in rooms bathed in light from the street, and when we wake in the wee hours of the morning, we flip on the lights we’d earlier turned off.
This constant glow disrupts our body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that helps us sleep. Melatonin also, researchers have found, suppresses the growth of cancerous tumors. Thus, nighttime glare increases our risk of developing cancer. [1]
Not all light causes problems, though. Candles and flickering fires are not bright enough to disturb our night vision or our melatonin production. We evolved to live with flame. But the intensity of our electric lamps has changed everything. For our bodies and our souls, we need to spend time in the dark, but dark is becoming increasingly hard to find.
The Darkest and the Lightest
Yet find it Bogard did. In his book, he describes what it was like to be in Eureka Valley, California, one of the darkest places on Earth. Leaving their car behind, he and his guide found a place to sit where there were no houses or cars, no streets, no artificial light of any kind. They could still see the hum of humanity that none of us can escape. Along the horizon, there was a faint glow from Los Angeles, and they noticed the distant flickering of airplane beacons near San Francisco. Still, in that desert, Bogard discovered a “primitive” darkness. Sitting there, he felt as if the sky were ancient. He could imagine living before the advent of civilization.
Having arrived there from civilization, however, it took hours for their light-bathed eyes to adjust enough that they could look at the sky and see more than the brightest stars. Hours. Eventually, though, Bogard noticed “stars upon stars,” and he had a sense, like the barest glimmer, that another layer of stars lay beyond. [2] By that time, the starlight provided enough of a glow that they could recognize shapes and shadows around them, could see the hulk of the distant hills. Once upon a time, it was like this for us always.
In contrast, there is Las Vegas, the brightest place on Earth. Bogard describes his experience there as akin to being “swallowed by light.” [3] Millions of bulbs burned on buildings, billboards, towers, and arcades. The streets were packed with cars that lent their own glow to the city’s already overwhelming illumination.
Even there, though, a few stars remained visible. Bogard’s guide showed him two of Orion’s stars, Rigel and Betelgeuse, and that brightest of stars, Sirius. Yet the Milky Way, which, it turned out, hung far above their heads, was washed out in the city’s glare.
Our Need to Run
It’s not just the light, though, that makes Las Vegas thrum. The city is a place of constant noise. People with microphones shout above the din of revelers and musicians. Crowds stream past, and though some people stare at their phones, others gawk or yell at each other. In Las Vegas, energy pulses. It can make us feel alive. In this world of fantasy and excess, every addiction is fed.
I’m reminded of a woman I visited in my rounds as a chaplain who thought of herself as “bubbly.” To me, she seemed frantic. On and on she chattered, starting with one topic, then, as soon as a hint of darkness showed in her face or her posture or her words, she started talking about something else.
After a while, I encouraged her to breathe, to be silent, perhaps even to be still. When she did that, tears came to her eyes. A few spilled down one cheek. Yet not even then could she identify how she felt.
“What were the tears about?” I asked.
What was that? Tears?
She knew she felt anxious. That was something of a constant, her anxiety. Yet sadness, despair, loneliness, annoyance, anger, whatever it was that revealed itself, was lost to her. Her pressured speech, like the assault of light and sound and action we twenty-first century Americans relish, distracted her from herself. We have discovered endless ways to numb our feelings. The faster we run, the more stimulation we crave, and the more stimulated we are, the more distressed we feel, so we seek out another distraction, another excess, another flashing light. In this way, we think we can avoid our distress. Instead, we feed our frenetic energy, fooling ourselves into believing our “bubbliness” is proof that we feel better. It’s all part of the make-believe world we inhabit.
Our Connection to the Sacred
Obviously, not everyone does this. Some people prefer slow and quiet lives, and there is beauty in the daytime as well as at night. Today, for instance, as morning dawned, a fine mist hung in the air. Trees, their leaves now yellow and brown, stood framed in a halo of fog. The call of the geese added a hint of melancholy to the magic of the moment, and as I walked, I noticed the odor of damp earth, the brush of the breeze against my skin. Though there were streetlights, the whine of an industrial leaf blower, the thrum of traffic in the distance, and the stink of a poorly-tended car, I could nonetheless embrace the beauty I found. Beauty is there, if we look.
Yet this frantic life we have chosen, our penchant for immediate gratification, our love of computer games and virtual reality and well-lit yards, has left us bereft. Not only are our bodies at risk, but we have lost that deeper connection to the land, to our own spirits, and to the sacred.
The bubbly woman was Christian. She was starting a prayer practice, hoping to reconnect with God. Every morning and night, she talked to God. That was good. Developing a routine of practice helps. But until she could learn to sit quietly and listen, her relationship with God would be tenuous.
Experiencing God
Only a few people choose the contemplative life. Most of us rush headlong into the future, screaming and whirling and turning on all the lights. Living that way is exciting, robust, creative. If such a whirlwind leads to addictions that burn us out and kill us young, is that so terrible? We have to die, why not die doing what we love?
The problem is, love isn’t what leads us to excess. Fear does that, a fear of truth, of our inner selves, of the holy, and the silent, and the dark.
That bubbly woman was so uncomfortable with her emotions that even when she tried to identify them, she could only sense her fear. Fear was okay because at least that made her safe. Or so she thought. In her fear, she ran and ran and ran, but she ran in circles, getting nowhere, growing tired, never reaching the harbor. In the realm of emotions, the only way to reach that safe port is by going through the fear, through the sadness, through the suffering. Instead, the woman avoided her emotions, for they seemed scarier to her than fear. She couldn’t bear to look at the darkness within.
Maybe that, too, is okay. If we can’t bear the darkness, perhaps we’re not ready for it. Some things are buried down deep for a reason. Behind the shadows of her body and mind hid the brilliance of the divine. It is the way of things. As Barbara Brown Taylor points out in her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, only in the darkness can we experience God. But if the woman wasn’t ready for that, it doesn’t help to drag her there.
To Move Slowly
There, though, in that scary night, lives God. For instance, in the Bible, as Taylor recounts, God sometimes used darkness to express his anger. Yet he also went to Abraham at night. In the dark, Jacob received his vision and also wrestled with the angel. At night, God guided the Hebrew people from Egypt, and in the darkness, he parted the Red Sea. Before he could show himself to wandering Israelites, he had to hide his glory in a cloud. Everyone knows you can’t look upon God’s radiance and survive. That’s why, if you want to know God, you have to enter the dark. [4]
In the dark is beauty, richness, wonder. Lurking there is also pain. But if we are brave, and if we enter into that dark and painful place, we will discover that beneath our suffering lies divinity. If our anxiety is keeping us away from the deeper, mysterious places within, maybe we need to honor that and move slowly. Uncovering our fears, finding our sadness, takes as long as it takes. If we try to push it, it will only take longer.
Moving slowly is counter-cultural, but so is sitting in the dark. To grow closer to God, to know ourselves, to find a way to peace, we must feel our feelings. There is no other way. But it’s important not to plunge into the darkness before we’re ready.
Embracing the Light and the Dark
When we are ready, though, it’s a great place to go. If we want to know ourselves, if we want to connect to our planet, the cosmos, our fellow creatures, to God, we have to go there. To learn what it means to be alive and to die, we must face the night. No one asks about life and death and meaning in Las Vegas, and certainly no one finds the answers to such questions there. But we can find both the questions and the hint of an answer in the empty desert, in the star-lit sky, in the hooting of owls and the song of crickets.
Light is a wonderful thing. It makes clear what once hid in shadow. It also pollutes. Electric light damages us, and it damages the Earth. How have so lost our connection to this world, to the holy, to our souls, that we think it’s okay to build one monster of technology after another? In the name of progress, we invent chemicals, plastics, toxic fumes, and artificial light. We are amazing creatures. What if, instead of trying to eradicate the night, we reclaimed it, embraced it? Might we not then find our own souls?
If so, then perhaps by entering into the night, by sitting there until our eyes adjust, we can undo this mess we have created and find our way back to being we really are, creatures of both night and day, sadness and joy. Perhaps then we will see that all of it is divine and treat it that way.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- Bogard, Paul, The End of Night, New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2013, 177-179 ebook.
- Ibid 405.
- Ibid 34.
- Taylor, Barbara Brown, Learning to Walk in the Dark, New York: HarperCollins, 2014, 47.
Photo by Nighthawk Shoots on Unsplash
Copyright © 2021 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.