The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. Paul Bogard

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ says. And Iain, who moved to London from Glasgow, Scotland, tells me, “When I came down here I’d never seen a gas lamp before. I was totally taken by the history, and I found myself walking along the streets looking at electric lights thinking, Bastards, why is that not gas?”

      London does seem to have an awkward relationship with its remaining lamps. While national heritage laws protect the lamps from being removed, apparently nothing in those laws protects them from being overwhelmed by electric light. On the edge of St. James’s Park I saw what seemed to epitomize the situation. There stood a Victorian lamp fixture with perfectly good and glowing gaslight. Immediately to its right, less than two feet away, stood a taller, newer lamppost with a glaring electric light of no design but far more light. While certainly this back-to-back placement of gas and electric isn’t uniform in London, rare is the street, park, or courtyard lit only by gaslight, and it’s easy—if you’re a fan of gaslight—to see this as an opportunity missed. As Iain says, “There’s no doubt that electricity is a better way to do it, but you also can’t deny the romance of gas lamps.”

      Both men consistently see evidence of the gas lamps’ enduring public appeal. “You’d be surprised how many people walk by the lamps and don’t bat an eye,” says Gary. “But as soon as we go out and put up a ladder on them, everybody stops and starts taking photographs.” Why do gas lamps appeal to us so? Part of it is simply that they are not as bright as electric lights—about as luminous as a 40-watt incandescent bulb. Part of it is that we like the Victorian fixtures; we like that style. Part of it is that gaslight’s lower temperature offers the red-orange color of an open flame, which we’re far more drawn to than bright white light. And finally, when you see a gas lamp on St. James Street in Covent Garden, or anywhere in London, you feel connected to the past—that nostalgia, that feeling of “so this is what it was like.” Brightness, design, color, history—gaslight creates a beauty not better than electric light, but different.

      One place to experience this truth best is around Westminster Abbey. The private courtyard behind the abbey known as Dean’s Yard is lit by gaslight, and, yes, it’s much darker than you might expect from a city square. In fact, it takes a few minutes for our eyes to adjust after walking from the pub past Parliament and the abbey. But as our eyes grow used to the darkness, the light becomes perfectly bright. As Gary says as we look around, “You can see what you need to see. It’s not daylight, but it’s a lovely effect.”

      The effect, though, is subtle. If your objective is to light a football stadium, for example, you won’t be happy with gaslight. When electricity first came to European streetlights, the public realized just how subtle the gaslight they’d grown used to was. You get the sense that some observers felt as though they’d been tricked. Said one Londoner, “Gas lighting had no effect whatsoever on the brightness of the street; it was not turned on at all for three evenings and nobody noticed the least difference.” Said another, “as soon as we look away from the broad thoroughfare into one of the side streets, where a miserable, dim gaslight is flickering, the eye-strain begins. Here darkness reigns supreme, or rather, a weak, reddish glow, that is hardly enough to prevent collisions in the entrances of houses … In a word, the most wretched light prevails.” You can’t blame nineteenth-century folks for feeling this way, and few of us today would willingly switch from electricity back to gas. But while we would never think to use gaslight to do the job of electric, we too often use electric lights to do the job of gas. You see this on Westminster Bridge, for example, where the lights seem far too bright, casting glare into the eyes of walkers, cyclists, and drivers. How much more beautiful would that bridge be if it were lit by flickering flames? And it’s not that when we overshadow the gaslight we haven’t a choice. If gaslight were deemed not bright enough for pedestrians, then waist-high, well-shielded electric lights could easily provide any walker the safety he or she needed while still allowing for the ambience created by the gaslights. Seeing London’s gas lamps amid the city’s already bright night raises the question of how we might genuinely appreciate all the benefits of electric light while at the same time avoiding what Stevenson called “that ugly blinding glare.” In the face of such ugliness, he argued, “a man need not be very … epicurean if he prefer to see the face of beauty more becomingly displayed.”

      Stevenson wrote “A Plea for Gas Lamps” near the end of the nineteenth century, when arc lights were increasingly in use in Europe and the United States and the writing was clearly on the wall for gas lamps. His was not a tirade “against light” in general but rather a caution against what he saw as the uncontrolled, uncomfortable brilliance of the new electric lights. He wrote with admiration about how, with the coming of the “gas stars” in the streets, those streets were better places, and the lamplighters were good people, even if every once in a while, “an individual may have been knocked on the head by the ladder of the flying functionary.” (I ask Gary about that. “Try not to,” he says.) But now, with electric light, these lamplighters and their lights were to be replaced by “tame stars” that “are to come out … not one by one, but all in a body and at once,” that is, with the flick of a switch. While wanting to “accept beauty where it comes,” Stevenson cautioned against what he saw as “a new sort of urban star … horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

      The technology we use to illuminate our nights has come a long way from those first arc lights, but I wonder if Stevenson’s caution to us might be the same: While light at night is welcome, can there be such a thing as too much? In doing away with darkness, what beauty do we lose?

      For hundreds of years this city was dark or nearly so, and I want to see if I can find more of that old London and the beauty it hides. I’ve chosen an old hotel in an old part of town where I can come and go by foot at any hour. For it’s walking I have in mind, in the middle of the night, with Charles Dickens.

      In “Night Walks” (1861), Dickens wrote, “Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep … caused me to walk about the streets all night.” Dickens had walked “at half-past twelve” during the “damp, cloudy, and cold” London winter, figuring that with the sun not rising until half-past five, he had plenty of time to explore. I have come to London in winter as well, during the longest nights of the year, and when I wake at 2:20 a.m., I can’t help but smile.

      I dress warmly but go unarmed and without light—no flashlight, no headlamp, no torch. The hotel has some five hundred rooms, most booked, but none of my fellow guests join me as I trot down the stairs from the fifth floor. The hallways and stairs are as bright as in every hotel in the world and will remain that way through this middle of the night, this lost time after 1:30 a.m. until maybe 4:00 that feels more like yesterday and not yet tomorrow. In the lobby, I see no one but a custodian vacuuming near the front door’s sliding glass. He doesn’t see me until I’m almost to the door, then offers a look of What? You’re going out there?

      I’m first on the Strand—one of London’s oldest and most well-known streets, on a cold December night, maybe 25 degrees—and then alone on Waterloo Bridge at quarter to three. West down the Thames, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament stand dark against the gray charcoal London sky. Big Ben’s round white face stands lit, as does the blue London Eye, the Ferris wheel on the river’s south bank. Above, I count twenty-four stars. Behind, looking east, amid apparent smoke and steam, the unlit silhouette of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the view a close copy of the famous photograph from the Blitz. That is, except for the skyscrapers going in behind, and the intense white lights off Blackfriars Bridge coming straight into my eyes.

      Dickens describes the Thames as having “an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected light seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the specters of suicides were holding them to show where they went down.” The river has claimed countless lives over the centuries, including those of eighteenth-century slaves jumping overboard to avoid their fate and six hundred passengers drowned in a paddle steamer sinking in 1878. I walk down the stony bank to the edge of the black water, the Thames feeling up close like a still wild presence at the heart of the frantic modern СКАЧАТЬ