Today the sun came out at a new angle—higher, noticeably diagonal, rather than horizontal. It felt stark, almost scouring in a way. Despite the still very cold air, the view held a new quality of light and a wider view that I had forgotten I knew. The winter light so narrows the scope of what we see, with shadows stretched into long, parallel lines across the snow.
Last week, I became entranced by an image of a classroom readied by candlelight—desks each with one sheet of paper and one candle. It sent me wandering into unexpected corners—of the shifts in how we think, how we write—how we talk, how we live—in rooms well-lit, and our expectations of what that term means compared to what it would have meant centuries prior.
So I waited until the new bright, clear sun of that day began to dip below the horizon again, and lit a candle on my desk, and wrote this by hand, curious to experience the limits of the growing dark, noticing how the reach of the flame became more defined as the room grew darker.
It’s another day now, and the newly diagonal light is hidden in clouds and heavy snow. I’ve turned off the lights again, noticing how the dimmer light adds a feeling of closeness, of quiet. The one candle flame I’ve lit burns brighter and then dim, waxing and waning slightly with a caught exhalation, or the breeze of my hand across the page.
I’m struck how writing this way feels hushed, intimate—I feel less inclined to edit as I write, the words scrawling across the page in a flurry of non-‘professional’ script—less formality, more personal, as if it’s an audience only of myself and the page alone. Not necessarily to be read, until it becomes typed. Details seem keener—the slight whispering scour of the pen across paper. The sharp shadow of my hand on the lower half of the page, the point of the pen emerging in clear silhouette the closer to the page. When I stop for a minute, one thought, feeling that arises clearly is: I love this. The quiet, the shadows, the feeling of warmth in the unassuming glow of the candle.
When electrification began, the strength of light grew exponentially. A typical Boston home in the 1830s had at most three candlesticks; an oil lamp in the 1890s—offering a different type of light some thought glaring—might have emitted as much as seven candlepower; an Edison lamp at the turn of the 20th century was around three lumen/watt, while a typical lamp today is 40W at the lowest.
Ryan Cordell, who teaches the class on writing by candlelight, writes:
In the twenty-first century, we are so accustomed to the ways electric light reshapes our daily lives that it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine landscapes, labor, and lives not defined by it.
The word landscapes is what hooks me in that sentence particularly. Last week I also came across the image below, snapped from films taken on the ISS. While beautiful, every time I see images of the earth and its density of cities reflected in densities of light, I try to imagine what the dark must have really been like before electricity—of what it would be like to see that night sky, to be aware of the next full moon, in order to take advantage of the full brightness of its reflected light to travel, visit a neighbor.
Increased illumination creates a much larger breadth of what can be seen, and when. It introduces a form of control that was otherwise unavailable. It colonized the night, with increased scopes of visual fields, an increase in human activity, and expectations of always being able to see, to know. Light is information, and in many ways electrification ushered in an information age. It also changed how we structure our lives, our work, our homes.
Before electrification, a family would have had to gather around a single light source for chores, conversation, reading, mending. With electric light, empty rooms could feel inhabited and warm, eliminating the need to gather around the light of a hearth fire or single lamp. Light meant the defeat of night—it changed when and where people gathered and worked, along with shifting ideas of public and private, productivity, safety, privacy, intimacy—and essentially, control.
The darkness of Alaskan winters is honestly, always a bit of a slog to get through. It’s not the cold so much as the days of horizontal light that is difficult at times—days of horizontal almost-sun. It weighs in different ways—the lack of shadow, the imposition of feeling like you need light.
For years first living in Anchorage, I would notice how much my body resisted the alarm (although in full disclosure, I’ve never been good with alarms), of arriving at work in the darkness of midnight, returning home in the darkness again. Missing the daylight hours in an office with minimal windows. It feels like chronic jet lag.
In Norway, there are laws about individual workplaces having daylight and views of the outdoors, recognizing the need for light and human health; but this is Alaska, a colonized frontier that still wants to prove it’s just like every other place in the US. So in the dark months, we go to work and school in the dark, arrive home in the dark, and wait until the weekend to see family and dogs in daylight. Offices often pay little attention to windows as a priority in this city (only a handful of executive offices had windows at the museum, something that the CEO and HR dismissed, saying essentially that staff who asked for a window were not committed enough to the work).
And yes, work. Empty office buildings stacked with lights on at night; supermarkets glaringly bright, clean, ordered at all hours. In an article on the social impacts of electric light, Mithra Moezzi writes:
These impressive displays convey feelings of cleanliness, power, productivity, and of availability. So too—far beyond the security lighting market—might lighting often be used to monitor, control, and discipline, rather than those on which the light is shed to see.
One of my favorite books of recent years is Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. In it he writes:
…we [the Japanese] tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.
Every winter, my body wants to hibernate—the same way that it feels energized in the late spring as we lean towards solstice, when twilight only comes for a few hours in the early morning after midnight. By October you can feel the light waning quickly each day—and also your body growing hungrier, with less energy, more enthusiasm for bed at earlier hours. I often think of studies on seasonal affective disorder and circadian rhythms that seem to pop up each year, and how they rarely acknowledge that there have been generations of peoples and cultures who have lived in cycles of full darkness, full light for millennia.
I thought of this again as I read this beautiful essay on the significance and experience in the lighting of a seal oil lamp—of the writer’s attention to thoughts of tradition, past lives, past generations, gathering with her family to light the lamp in the dark of an Alaskan winter.
I wish that we could live in places and actually honor—live by—the rhythms of the place. Living by electric light, and dependence on its infrastructure, is a somewhat bewitching, exacting power—enforcing everyone across wildly different landscapes and latitudes to march to the same well-lit drum, beating morning and night.
Each winter I like to think of the bears or wood frogs—almost resurrected each spring, supercooling their bodies into stasis and waiting for the vertical light to return to warm them into life again. What adaptations are leaving us as we cling to increasing ideas of well-lit, of constant information, of blue screens lighting our faces, of constant availability of light?
I admit I’m completely enmeshed in all of it. Crave it even at times. But part of me wishes that the boundaries between night and day could be observed—and importantly that slowing of twilight in between—could be respected. I wonder what we’re missing, now that our world is wedded to relying so heavily on visual sight, a dependence only on what is seen to be believed. What might we be missing in our immediate spaces by the distractions of an ever-broadening field of vision?
Light = enlightenment. To see the light. To shed light on. Be illuminated spiritually. Come into the light. Bright as an adjective of intelligence. A lightbulb symbolizing a brilliant idea. Brilliant—shining. Light as cleanliness, intelligence, power, love. The light of my life.
Dark = evil, ignorance; oppression. In the dark as a state of ignorance or secrecy. Obscure, not easily understood. A dark horse. Dark ages. The dark side. It was a dark time. Foreboding. Overshadowed.
I’ve become fascinated by the ways that terms of light and dark are used metaphorically, after living in northern places. How it seeps into the subconsciousness, colors how we approach and live with the darkness in winter.
My son has grown up here and he loves the dark. He loves the sense of excitement when the days shorten in fall, of the steadiness of living in a twilight day. I like that it doesn’t bother him, that he welcomes it—I try to share something of his enthusiasm and delight in it. But it still weighs on me. I was always scared of the dark as a kid. At the same time, I’ve always been a night owl, and despite my fears of the dark I realize I have some of his delight in nighttime too—its quiet, its slowness, its possibility.
When he was young enough to go along with my love of poetry, I would recite the first lines of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock when we would leave the house, and he learned it enough to join in:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky…
Twilight, as the liminal state between night and day, light and dark, is often associated with magic, intimacy, imagination, and the supernatural. As if the ambiguity of the light’s status—of not night, not day—allows for the possibility of something otherworldly, not fully visible. The darkening corners that turn black before the immediacy of what’s in front of you. The gloaming—"twilight, the fall of evening," from glom "twilight," which is related to glowan "to glow" (hence "glow of sunrise or sunset”).
In Beowulf, Grendel—the menacing monster—comes from the borders of the forest, the dark places, the liminal in between light and dark. The Old English name for Grendel is sceadugenga – shadow walker, night goer.
The farther north one travels, the longer the twilights are in between solstices. I remember the first summer north in Alaska I couldn’t believe how long the feeling and view of twilight lasted—it felt like a suspension of the cycle of day and night, like we’d stumbled into a realm without time or where time stopped for a while. A slowed suspension. Eerie and beautiful.
William Maxwell writes, in a letter to Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1968 about rural Ireland and his experiences of long twilight, writing:
The long twilights were even more satisfactory…it was like having everything you had ever lost given back to you. You are used to this phenomenon, probably, but I simply couldn’t get over it. Twilight, and then the half light that comes after that, and then the quarter light, and the eighth light, and then the almost darkness that is still a kind of light, in which the shapes of things emerge in all their solidity, and people are doing very odd things—such as fishing at eleven thirty at night—and the supernatural is not at all implausible.
In Ireland it’s believed that fairies disappeared with the advent of electricity driving away the darkness literally and figuratively (as fairies can be a sketchy bunch not to be crossed).
Light also facilitates surveillance and represents power over and attention to, while darkness gives respite: to be in the spotlight as opposed to standing in the shadows.
There’s something of this sense of respite—of relief from the visibility of the day—throughout the pages of In Praise of Shadows that I’ve thought of repeatedly after reading it: it’s the idea of imperfection, of mystery, of the need for shadows and the blurring of vision, a limit to the view. Limiting a view can actually create focus, giving attention and visibility to one object, limning the definition and detail that might otherwise be obscured.
It reminds me of setting out to write a poem or sketch of an idea that is too well-formed in the mind—it never works. It so often needs less clarity of vision, to allow for the unknown to come forward in the act of creating. It can be maddening, because we are so attuned to having clarity and a sense of needing a full view in order to understand. Surveillance and power over. Control. We’re steeped in the ethos of well-lit, of exponential lumens, and bombarded daily with all information possible. It’s difficult to unlearn. As Tanazaki writes:
So benumbed are we nowadays by electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination.
So I’m trying to unlearn my resistance to the weight of full darkness in Alaskan winters. The discomfort is part of the un-numbing. At the same time, learning to welcome it means remembering the allure of night and twilight, the shadow times when less is expected, less is controlled, less is seen—which means broader possibilities can be imagined.
…gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer with the view.
--V. Nabokov, Pale Fire
I think what speaks to me the most in the congruence of stories I read last week of different lights is that they are familiar to the past—candles, lamps, and other types of non-electric light are about connecting with people of the past, generations who lived and knew the secrets of shadows, twilight, and the glow of firelight. The gatherings they invite, the darkness held only slightly at bay—as if the night is simply another companion, gathering around the single light to share in the conversation, chore, dance, story. A candle lit on my desk felt as if I could imagine the writings of others through time—which is probably why the hush, the sort of reverence for the light as I wrote became more intimate. It’s a sharing of a light that is anciently familiar.
As Tanazaki closes his book, I will close this with his quote:
In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I wuold push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly. I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them…
Yes.
For a great read that includes some of the sources cited above: The Last of the Light by Peter Davidson.
I admit, I love the light. When the sun shines, I have more energy. All the lights in my house are bright. I feel myself shut down as the days shorten. I can't imagine living at high latitudes with the long dark winters. My limited experience of such latitudes was in summer. So thank you for this lovely reflection on darkness and dim light. It's given me a different perspective
I absolutely love this. I had a steady writing-by-candlelight-in-the-morning practice going that I've fallen away from that I am determined to reinvigorate. Especially after this past weekend, where I had many hours alone in a tiny cabin lit by dim, if electric, light that reminded me of my candles. This was in Yellowstone National Park, and there were two nights so clear and cold and stars and moon absolutely brilliant. I love the dark, lit by stars and tiny flames, and just never get enough of it.
(I also love the In Praise of Shadows book)