Poet Troy Jollimore ruminates on why Americans like it when angle-poise lamps and klieg lights block our view of the universe
What do young people who have grown up in cities think, I wonder, when they see van Gogh’s “Starry Night”? Those who have never witnessed the majestic tapestry presented by a truly dark night sky must think van Gogh twice as insane as he in fact was. Perhaps they assume that this wild display of celestial glory was a hallucination, something that the hyper-imaginative artist simply made up out of, as it were, thin air. Whereas those of us who have seen the stars know that, yes, van Gogh exaggerated—but not by much.
“If a man would be alone,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “let him look at the stars ... One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are!” But our atmosphere is no longer transparent, and the prospect of standing in a city street to look at the stars may strike us as ludicrous. The proliferation of artificial lighting has blotted out the nightly display our predecessors took for granted. On a clear, dark night, about 3,500 stars should be visible to the naked eye; many contemporary city dwellers are fortunate if they can see 50. According to recent statistics, more than half of American children have never seen the Milky Way.
If you are worried about our growing isolation from the universe, you are not alone. Organizations like the Dark Sky Society and the International Dark-Sky Association have begun to raise the alarm, calling for legislation to curb light pollution and restore the night sky’s splendor. Still, one can hardly complain about this state of affairs without feeling like a bit of a Luddite. Look at the very vocabulary we use to describe the movements of history. Am I really urging that we turn our backs on “the Enlightenment”? Would I really have us return to the “Dark Ages”? Light has been used as a metaphor for truth, wisdom and progress at least since Plato. It is hard not to sympathize with the sentiment, voiced by Robert Louis Stevenson, that with the artificial lighting of cities, “The work of Prometheus had advanced by another stride.”
Such thoughts, though, lead us to forget how much of being human is essentially connected to the dark and the night. Emerson was exactly right that a sky full of blazing stars is not merely beautiful, but truly sublime. The various gods that we humans have created in our image have always struck me as dull and unimpressive compared to the spectacle of the night sky: its vastness, its awe-inspiring indifference. Many scientists and skeptics who are not otherwise much inclined to anything resembling religious experience have written movingly of the feelings of reverence and wonder that overtake them when faced with the celestial canvas. There is little in the contemporary world that can so successfully remind us how tiny, how insignificant and how vulnerable we are.
And this, surely, is part of the reason why so many people seem so untroubled by the night sky’s disappearance. We are a people that tend to like things comfortable, easy and pleasant, and to shy away from what is difficult, disturbing and, well, dark. Just as we attempt to fill our days with noise—the buzzing of coffee shop conversation, the lulling drone of Muzak—in order to drive away the silence, we attempt to fill our nights with light to keep away the dark. Darkness, like silence, throws us back on our own resources; it refuses to comfort, console or distract. And it hardly needs to be pointed out that both darkness and silence remind us of death.
But what sort of life remains available to us, once we drive away the dark? So many of our myths of spiritual progress involve some “dark night of the soul,” some journey through a shadowy underworld from which the hero emerges transformed, wiser and more powerful than before. It is no accident that Dante’s tour of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven begins halfway through his life “in a dark wood.” Can we possibly hope to greet the sunrise with the same enthusiasm with which Thoreau greeted it, if we have not endured the dark night which ought to precede it? Will there even be such a thing as a sunrise in a world of
perpetual twilight?
“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,” Emerson wrote, “how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.” What was for Emerson a mere thought experiment, a flight of fancy, is now reality for a significant portion of the earth’s population, who have never seen a comet firsthand or witnessed the brilliant yellow-green trail—more vivid than any human fireworks—an especially large meteor leaves in its wake.
During the East Coast power outage of August 2003, many surprised urbanites emerged from their homes to discover that Emerson’s city of God was still there, hanging over their heads, patiently waiting for its chance to reappear for a fleeting moment. I would like to think that we residents of the over-illuminated western hemisphere will soon choose of our own accord to turn down the lights and invite the darkness back into our lives. As a musician I know likes to say, you need the black keys along with the white ones to play the really interesting chords.
Troy Jollimore is an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and associate professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico. His book, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, published by local press MARGIE/IntuiT House, was selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins to win the 2005 Robert E. Lee & Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award and received the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Hear him read October 6 at the Cabaret at Savor (4356 Lindell) along with local poet Jayne O. Wayne; visit observable.org for details. Jollimore returns to St. Louis on February 18, 2008, to read for the River Styx at Duff’s series with acclaimed Missouri novelist Gladys Swan. For more details, go to riverstyx.org.
