The Enormous Lighted-ness of BeingBy Jane Holtz Kay "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between eternities of darkness." - Nabokov, Speak Memory. Light is life, then. Light is all. Or so the spiritual among us imagine its almighty source: the beginning light of Eden's fertile dawn, a gauzy radiance drawn by the hand of nature's Great Designer. The natural light of paradise. Truth to tell, though, I find my illumination in a more urban Eden: the city buildings and boulevards basking in the transient glow of artificial light. The oh-so-faux décor of pinprick brilliance that switches downtown into a Mondrian jazz at night; the vintage mellow-yellow acorn bulbs that create a walker's paradise, turning my row houses into a brooding russet wall, poking in and out of the crevices of buildings through the day, pooling the brick sidewalks when dusk shuts down the light. Natural? Artificial? What odd semantic split makes us dissect our lighted-ness, I wonder, as I pace the shouldering row houses of the Back Bay where I live. This place I call home is both "real" and "faux." A neighborhood built on wetlands, my cityscape is as unnatural as its vast alteration of marsh to mainland, yet as natural as the human impulse to build. Hammering pilings into the murk and mire of the soggy soil, the sturdy souls of 19th-century Boston constructed this after-the-fact place from the bay. Laborers in the building arts chiseled its stone canvas to sculpt the play of light along the flanks of buildings promenading westward into the setting sun. A mile long. A century in the making.
In time, this upstairs-downstairs neighborhood succumbed to poverty. Boarders divided and walled off the sun-filled rooms. Yet the light entered again, in the hands of elegant singletons, who punched holes in roofs to gather back the light. And newcomers (myself among them) now sit on the vaunted "sunny side" of the street to take the morning light. Light and shadow, the celestial hand and the architect's artifice, endure. Natural or artificial? Either way, light is inconstant. If sunlight is a servant to the city, it is a fickle one, inclined to steam the streets in summer and hold itself back in winter. When snow and ice crust the brick streets of New England's winter drab, the city sunlight takes a solstice holiday, and darkness demands the artificial lights that glow in every office window long before clock-punchers depart. The sun-less chill slicks the sidewalk into a menace to walkers. And the dimming of early evening stirs thoughts of Dylan Thomas's "rage against the dying of the light," if not Durkheim's more somber bond between "le noir" and "le suicide." City lights come to the rescue now. As eyes illuminate the soul, so artificial bulbs illuminate the spirit of the city. Bright Lights, Big City, declared the 1980s pulp novel. And what would downtown be without the White Way? Yet, with that radiance has come the aggrandizing of illumination in our unkind decades. "Light the Night" merchants, arguing that brighter bulbs bring safer streets, have upped wattages everywhere. Down with carved lighting posts crowned with the golden glow of 19th -century gaslight. Obliterate the warm-toned signature acorn fixture. A new flock of goosenecked, concrete standards, achingly tall, hover everywhere, casting their spectral blue, mercury-vapor light. Bred on the 90-mile-an-hour ethos of the highway, the Society of Illuminating Engineers' interstate-scaled concrete poles assault the radiant city. As urban beacons of light swell from mellow glow to wastrel litter, light is not just artificial now, but aggressive. The inflated brilliance and wattage of an ever-more populous, electrified, planet alters the very heavens, dimming the twinkling constellations, from mountaintop to valley, sea to sea. The windows of the empty towers burn through the city night, the floodlit parking lots create creepy islands around Big Box stores, while sprawling development, and the highways and headlights of our cars spit the kilowatts that dim the sky. Yet, even as we squander the starry night and the black velvet skies of evening turn to gray across the planet, protest has followed. Outraged astronomers, quoting French physicist Jean Perrin, argue that, "It is indeed a feeble light that reaches us from the starry sky. But what would human thought have achieved if we could not see the stars?" Allies in the Dark Sky movement have formed to stop this literal"dying of the light." Arizona's worldwide International Dark-Sky Association and others star-seekers have mourned the lost galaxies, the wayfaring by the North star, and the inky heavens spoiled by spilled light.
New movers and shakers arise to tell us that we creatures of the light, both artificial and natural, must learn to temper the mischief of this artifice. Turn down the light; shield the killer bulb; kill the naked arc; change the sodium-blue city into mellow yellow, say activists. Scientists have even provided a new vocabulary to categorize "crimes" of light: "light trespass" (when the back porch anti-burglar light shines next door); "sky glow" (when it chars the atmosphere, hiding the stars); and "glare" (when the rays from unshielded lights soar to the cosmos.) Architects and artists, too, have become dim-the-light agents, offering a more esthetic couture. Cap the tops of fixtures to stop light flight into celestial quarters, they admonish; direct light downward to affect the roseate brick sidewalks and inky summer skies of Nantucket, they suggest. Try back-lighting buildings to let the radiance of these landmarks light the night, LightBoston proposes, organizing to crate a more subtle artificial illumination along the architectural profiles of King's Chapel and other historic buildings--a "Diamond Necklace," providing glow, not glare. Natural light? Artificial? No matter. We must cobble together an urban world that does not overlight the sky, a city of midnight-black heavens and softly-lit streets. Do so and we fortify the environmental aspirations of the hour - that the natural and the artificial can be one, that we can create ecological harmony and architectural beauty. Respect for starry starry nights and luminous city streets is respect for planetary life. Concern with the lighted-ness of being is as celebratory - and urgent - as the veneration of life itself. This article appeared in Appalachia Magazine, Spring 2003.
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Planners and masons delineated the shifting styles and detail, from brooding French mansard roofs to regal High Georgian ornament, within the disciplined unity of this street wall. And all the while, the sun played light and shadow to define the changing detail of their façades across the New Land, penetrated the sunlit rooms for the rich, and filtered into the more cramped quarters for the poor
Light - artificial, garish light, accidental light prone to slip, skid and escape its confines - has become an ecological enemy. Ornithologists fret over the danger to birds circling our blazing midnight towers, destroyed in the frantic search for their flight paths. Scientists utter fears over the loss of dark-ness that changes the biological clocks of small amphibians, reptiles, and birds and warn of medical consequences to humans from loss of darkness. Environmentalists deplore the waste of energy and resources that squander global wealth and increase global warming.