Darklessness

I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Now I'm typing about it--in the darkness. Or at least as close as my world is going to get to darkness this morning. I woke up at exactly 5:00 a.m., according to the only artificial light in my bedroom, the three glowing red digits of my alarm clock. And yet I could see quite clearly: my closet, the door, the art on the walls. And, of course, the outlines of the blinds on my windows, which do not fully obscure the urban light spilling in from the street outside. Even with the alarm clock's face completely covered by my hand, I could see just as clearly as before, by the city's glow, the artificial world around me.

Hence my small rebellion: I'm typing by the soft light of my laptop screen, and that light from the windows--and nothing more. It's still too much, in a sense. I can almost feel the ebb of melatonin from my blood. Among other things, that nocturnal hormone protect people against cancer. But melatonin flees the light, so my level of it is presumably now falling because of the increased brightness of my immediate environment. (That said, I just took 3 milligrams of the stuff in a pill, in an artificial effort to offset the effect of the artificial light.)

Darkness-less (or is it darklessness?) rarely leaves my mind these days. It was hard not to think about it when, for example, I went stargazing--meteor-watching, actually--with some friends earlier this week. Sunday night was said to be the annual peak of the Perseid meteor shower, so we drove to the darkest spot we could find within a few miles of our Washington, D.C., homes. Our driver turned off the headlights as we approached the site, knowing that other stargazers with darkness-adjusted eyes would already be there. To help our own eyes adjust, we used no flashlights as we climbed out of the car and laid out a blanket. And even then, we saw only a few shooting stars in the hour-plus that we spent lying on our backs beneath the sky. How many did we miss, how many passed unseen before our eyes, obscured by the glow of our nation's capital?

David Owen offers an answer of sorts--and much, much more--in a beautiful piece he wrote for the current issue of the New Yorker:

"Today, a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright stars--less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see without a telescope."

So, in another place, in another time, the three or four streaks of light that I glimpsed while watching the Perseids might have been complemented with several hundred other shooting stars. Instead, those glowing rocks, eclipsed by the spillage of light from the city, eluded my eyes. I returned home that night a bit disappointed. Like my vigil itself, the final glory of those meteors--the blazing arcs they traced in their self-destroying entry into earth's atmosphere--had been in vain. The light seared all.

Our world, it seems, has grown darkless.