This old house has prehistoric electrical wiring and an array of light fixtures ranging from the Paleozoic (paraffin oil lamps) to the Precambrian (brass bedside lamps that look like paraffin oil lamps). Do you remember the singing candlestick, Lumiere, from Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”? I think of my 1920s candelabra sconces like Lumiere. Every month or two, one or the other of these ancient troupers — old and exhausted from a lifetime performing in the footlights — puts on his stage pancake and rouge for the very last time and takes his curtain call, bowing with a flourish of sleeve and leaving us sitting there in darkness.
Seventeen Edwards Lane had slowly been descending into the gloom for a year or more: First one, then two, then three, then four of the brass candlestick-shape 1920s sconces had broken down, switches slipping, pull-chains stuck. It’s hard to get an appointment with any tradesperson around here these days, and that is certainly true of electricians. Last week, I convinced a new electrician — an Irish one, named Donal — to come to my house and have a look at my defunct doorbell and my somnambulant sconces. I felt like I’d won a door prize. I followed Donal around the house chatting excitedly, like he was a visiting guest from Buckingham Palace, so lucky was I to have him.
Even when all the sconces are burning, our household lighting is antiquated and, most people would think, totally inadequate. The kitchen has “modern” lighting, on dimmers; it was last rewired and relighted in 1974. I’m not joking. My parents put in the modern lighting in 1974. It is dim in this house three seasons of the year. In spring, autumn, and winter, there is a notable moodiness to the interior illumination. (In summer — not having air- conditioning, naturally, because I dwell stubbornly in the past — I leave the exterior doors wide open to allow in more light and the atmosphere in the house turns sunny.) When a power line is knocked down in a hurricane, I strike a kitchen match to an old oil lamp and feel a thrill of perverse triumph over modernity. All I want is a black night.
Naturally, like all cranks and eccentrics, I’m convinced that science will eventually prove me right, and that it will transpire that humans are healthier of mind, body, and spirit when there is less artificial-light interference with our access to moonshine and sunshine and the stars. Plants, tides, and animals are somehow, mysteriously — mysteriously, mind you, not mystically — attuned to the phases of the spheres, and I’m sure we are, too. (Hey, I was right about plastics! I knew even as a kid that plastic was leaching into our bottled beverages and Tupperwared spaghetti. Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.)
Naturally, also, the children do not agree with my opinions on what constitutes adequate lighting. They would much rather live in a white box of artificial light, like the average modern spec house. My son and my daughter both sleep each night in bedrooms illuminated with LED light strips. If you’re not a parent of kids under the age of 18, you might not know about these. They are thin strips of colored lights, a sort of tape or ribbon, that adhere to the walls or ceilings of kids’ bedrooms, in colors of electric-blue, shamrock-green, Creamsicle-orange, yellow, fuchsia, and violet. They often come with a remote control, and can be made to dim or brighten, or flash in patterns. I keep asking Teddy how he can sleep like that, with Broadway show lights dancing around his head. But he likes it.
I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I must remember to move the Wi-Fi and router boxes, which flicker all night long, out of my own bedroom. I do not like the half-light of our digital world. There’s a built-in cabinet in my bedroom that holds my sweaters and pants and, on the bottom shelf, a jumble of unwanted electronic parts and chargers. At Christmas, I stuffed into this shelf an orblike electronic toy thingie — used how? for what game? I don’t know — belonging to my nephew, Ellis, and it has been flashing and blinking in there since December, a blue glow through the chink in the cabinet door.
Being less than fully on board with much of the things we take for granted in our contemporary consumerist civilization in general, I hate the dead hum of air-conditioning (and pool heaters) and I hate light pollution. Some people go about their days with a constantly runny nose from hay fever, and I go about my nights issuing a constantly running commentary and complaint about light pollution. I am still miffed about the landing strip of brighter streetlights that were installed along Main Street during my sojourn in Budapest way back in the mid-1990s! I especially dislike it when trees are spotlighted with up-light illumination, as if they were specimens in an art gallery. Leave the tree alone. It’s not a Brancusi. It’s tiring walking around hating everyone else’s landscape lighting.
It’s also, I know, incredibly tiresome to anyone in my vicinity that I won’t just relax about it and enjoy the opportunities to perambulate at night with a reduced risk of tripping and falling.
But I ask you: Is it not strange to think that most human beings on this Earth will never experience true darkness? That you, yourself, have probably never in your life been far enough away from the inhuman electronic buzz of civilization to have fallen asleep under the cover of a true dark night? At night, there is a low glow over the entire Village of East Hampton, a dome centered over Herrick Park and the Reutershan parking lot. Sometimes, if it’s foggy, this dome of low light is dirty orange, a burnt umber. The colors of our digital Earth are otherworldly. The street lamps, parking lots, and office blocks cast too much light for the starshine to be seen.
And then, too, even the stars in the sky — the starlight — isn’t what it always was. Now some of the stars we see when we look up aren’t stars but satellites and aircraft, and we cannot tell the difference, most of us, with our naked eye. Most humans alive today have never looked up at the night sky and seen only stars.