At Random for October 23, 2009
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I feel strange in saying so, but one of the nicest things my Grandmother Heitman gave me was the gift of darkness. I’m not talking about mental or spiritual darkness, but the physical darkness that descended on her country home on the evenings I’d spent the night there.
I lived in town, where street lamps kept our night hours bathed in perpetual manmade moonlight. To lie in a rollaway bed in my grandmother’s den after dusk fell was a startling change. The blackness outside was as solid as a cast iron skillet, and troubling at first. But I felt safe under the covers, which gave me the confidence to consider the mystery of the darkness that blanketed my grandmother’s rural homestead.
To be in the dark was to get a useful sense of one’s smallness in the larger world, and of the world’s inexhaustible mystery.
All of this came to mind the other day while reading “Our Vanishing Night,” an essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg that appeared in National Geographic last year. Klinkenborg’s article has just been republished in “The Best American Essays 2009,” a great anthology that collects a lot of memorable stuff from America’s national journals.
Klinkenborg’s essay is worth savoring and remembering because of its central point:
As our suburbs widen, and the lights of development throw ever more illumination into the landscape, night itself could become a thing of the past.
“This kind of engineering is no different from damming a river,” Klinkenborg tells readers. “Its benefits come with consequences — called light pollution — whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it’s not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is.”
Because of light pollution, astronomers and amateur stargazers have trouble seeing the constellations. Artificial light has so encroached night-time darkness that it’s distorting the mating and migration patterns of many species of animals. Human health might also be affected by the diminishing darkness of night, though research on the subject is just beginning.
“Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself,” Klinkenborg adds.
I thought about this last week during a speaking gig in rural north Louisiana, where my host had put me up for the night in her farm house deep in the woods.
My 8-year-old son was along for the trip.
As we snuggled under a blanket within darkness that had descended as dramatically as a curtain, I felt grateful that another generation was learning what it really means to be in the dark.
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