The Night was once very dark and black and feared.

🌚 “Night knew no bounds. Goethe, on a moonlit evening in Naples, was “overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.”

                              — A. Roger Ekirch 

                             from At Day's Close: Night in Times Past

When I was a small child, my grandmother lived in a very old house with little electricity. She was incredibly poor and each room in her house had an electrical outlet that hung down in the center of each room of her four room house. Each wire had a few sockets, the bottom one for a light bulb. She was very careful with extension cords used and so forth for as long as I knew her. No need to burn the house down. Most of the time we were in the dark after a certain time of night. Once I asked my grandmother what it was like for her as a child concerning the dark and she told me. Right then, I became acquainted with Night in a way that none of my childhood friends would ever consider. It made me wonder about past times and how Night was for ordinary people in villages and small towns across my country, and then across places I had studied in school, and later, all around the world. Once people thought Night was an entity, the dark simply rolled out as the sun set like a supernatural force. Cities and people once used torches and then candles, followed by lamplight of some kind. I walked around my house for three days with just candlelight last year just to see how it would be and I could hardly read a book. In fact, I did little reading and writing in that time. And I do not live in true Night or darkness. Not like these past people did. Even in the suburbs of a small city like Memphis, I have light in the sky. I have street lights. I have vehicles passing the street in front of my house. I have good flashlights. Even my Apple phone has a flashlight. So no, I am not in the dark of past times. But my grandmother lived in the countryside the first 20 years or so of her life and it was dark. Perhaps not dark as past times, but still very dark. They had oil lamps. No electricity until the 1930s for her. No indoor plumbing, no washing machine. Certainly no dryer and the refrigerator was some sort of antique that really did not work. But it was the light that my grandmother wanted. She taught herself to read and she loved to write letters and read magazines and the few books she could get from the county library when someone traveled to the next town. Electricity is something we all take for granted. It's just there. And are lives are not interrupted by Night at all, especially in large cities.

IN order to really grasp Night, I went to the planetarium in Memphis. Before the show, they turned out all the lights and it was so dark and black, that I could not see my own nose or my hand when I raised it toward my face. I felt an immediate sense of anxiety and because it was a social experiment, the blackness went on for minutes. During that time, I felt blind and as though I had been swallowed by Night. I couldn't even breathe properly. I lost, briefly, any sense of space and direction. In that moment, I felt as though I was in past times and I was out in the middle of the country, with no moon or stars, no light, nothing but darkness. It felt like an entity.

In Anthropology, we learned very quickly that fire was one of the most important possessions of early hominoids. Before they learned to make fire on their own, they captured it from Nature in various ways. Lightning strikes being one. Can you imagine living in darkness, moonlight or starlight your only source of light at Night and then one day you capture Fire? And then later you learn to make this Fire and it not only lights your Night, it warms you, and it also cooks meat and fish. It also scares some predators. Fire was a gift.

These three books have been valuable research for me, along with my own personal experiments to understand Night in past times and to experience candlelight, lamplight, and even firelight. This has been important research for my work-in-progress and also for my own connections to my grandmother and her mother and the people who came before them. When I read about Goethe or Shelley or other historical figures, I try to imagine how they lived in the Night. And even now, around the world, in less developed countries, people experience darkness in a way that we do not understand at all.