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

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СКАЧАТЬ by the real sky over a town much darker than the towns we live in today. So a painting of a night imagined? Sure. But unreal?

      In our age, yes. But Van Gogh lived in a time before electric light. In a letter from the summer of 1888, he described what he’d seen while walking a southern French beach:

      The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more sparkling gemlike than at home—even in Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires.

      It’s remarkable to modern eyes, first of all, that Van Gogh would reference the stars over Paris—no one has seen a sky remotely close to this over Paris for at least fifty years. But stars of different colors? It’s true. Even on a clear dark night the human eye struggles to notice these different colors because it works with two kinds of light receptors: rods and cones. The cones are the color sensors, but they don’t respond to faint illumination. The rods are more finely attuned to dim light, but they don’t discriminate colors. When we look at a starry sky, the sensitive but color-blind rods do most of the work, and so the stars appear mostly white. Add to this that we seldom stay outside long enough for our eyes to adapt to the dark, and then the fact that most of us live with a sky deafened by light pollution, and the idea that stars come in different colors seems wildly impossible, like something from Willy Wonka or Lewis Carroll (or Vincent van Gogh). But gaze long enough, in a place dark enough that stars stand in clear three-dimensional beauty, and you will spot flashes of red, green, yellow, orange, and blue.

      You may even feel as the Dutch painter did, that “looking at the stars always makes me dream.”

      But this morning at MoMA I am here to see two paintings, the second so little known that the museum doesn’t even have it on display. It’s through the kindness of Jennifer Schauer, who oversees the paintings in storage, that I get to see it. She marches me past The Starry Night to a room in which many paintings that the museum has no room to display are kept; 75 percent of the collection is here. Schauer looks at a label or two and then pulls out a fencelike wall on which the painting I’ve come to see hangs. And here it is, blazing away: Giacomo Balla’s Street Light from 1909. For me, the fact MoMA has its view of a starry night on display every hour of every day, while this brilliantly colorful painting of an electric streetlight is hidden in backroom shadows, is deliciously ironic. This may be the only place in the city where the streetlight has been put away while the starry night continues to shine.

      Here is a painting of the very thing that makes Van Gogh’s vision of a starry night such an unrealistic one for most of us. In both paintings, the moon lives in the upper right corner, and for Van Gogh, the moon is a throbbing yellow presence pulsing with natural light. But for Balla, the moon has become a little biscuit wafer hanging on for dear life, overwhelmed by the electric streetlight. And that, in fact, was Balla’s purpose. “Let’s kill the Moonlight!” was the rallying cry from Balla’s fellow Italian futurist, Filippo Marinetti. These futurists believed in noise and speed and light—human light, modern light, electric light. What use could we now have of something so yesterday as the moon?

      “It’s lighting itself up,” Schauer says. On a canvas three times the size of The Starry Night, with a background of darkness painted sea blue-green and brown, the electric lamp radiates rose-mauve-green-yellow in upside-down Vs. The lamppost is a candy cane of those same colors, while concentric circles of the colorful Vs reverberate with resonant light. Here is an optimistic vision of what electricity would mean, not only a night brighter than what we’d known but one more beautiful as well. Indeed, were this what electric lighting had eventually come to be, Balla’s reverence would be absolutely understandable even in our day. But of course, as my host says, “New York is never dark enough to see this.”

      And so here, fifty meters apart, hang two paintings that span a bridge of time when night began to change from something few of us have ever known into the night we know so well we don’t even notice it anymore. Done in the southern French countryside at the end of the nineteenth century, Van Gogh’s is a painting of old night. Done in the city at the start of the twentieth century, Balla’s is a painting of night from now on. With time, electric lights like the one Balla portrayed would spread across western Europe and North America, perhaps inspiring the popularity of Van Gogh’s painting as they did: As we lost our view of our own starry night, our view of his became more and more fantastic—this old night he had known and loved and experienced by gaslight.

       8

       Tales from Two Cities

       The secrets are very simple. Blend light with the surroundings. Don’t annoy the birds, the insects, the neighbors or the astronomers. If City Hall gave me money to do whatever I want, I’d teach people about the beauty of light.

      —FRANçOIS JOUSSE (2010)

      Gas street lighting first took flame on Pall Mall in London in 1807, with the light hailed as “beautifully white and brilliant.” Within a decade more than forty thousand gas lamps lit over two hundred miles of London streets, a scene described by a visitor as “thousands of lamps, in long chains of fire.” When, by 1825, the British capital was the most populous city in the world, no other place on earth was as extensively lit, or as bright.

      Though “bright” depends on whom you ask. To the nineteenth-century eye—which until that time had never seen streets lit by more than candle lanterns or oil lamps—gaslight would have been unquestionably bright. But to our modern eye, gas lamps can seem questionably dim—you might wonder if they’re even working. This isn’t only perception—modern Londoners (as well as city dwellers all over the world, including 40 percent of Americans) live amid such a wash of electric light that their eyes never transition to scotopic, or night, vision—never move from relying on cone cells to rod. With gaslight, they did—the nineteenth-century eye saw gaslit nights with scotopic vision, and so what would seem to us incredibly dim seemed to a Londoner at the time the perfect artificial light, with “a brightness clear as summer’s noon, but undazzling and soft as moonlight,” one that created “a city of softness and mystery, with sudden pools of light fringed by blackness and silence.” London ranks now as one of the brightest cities in the world—a white-hot splat on the World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness. Nonetheless, I have come to the city to see if, even so, amid all that light, that “city of softness and mystery” remains.

      I have a hunch it might, as London is still home to more than sixteen hundred gas lamps, most in the famous parts of town north of the Thames such as Westminster, the Temple, and St. James’s Park. British Gas, which has direct responsibility for twelve hundred, employs a six-man gas lamp team made up of two gas engineers and four lamplighters, each of whom tends to four hundred lamps. Though they no longer need light each individual lamp, a task Robert Louis Stevenson described in 1881 as “speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the dusk,” the lamplighters make a circuit from lamp to lamp that usually runs about two weeks, cleaning the lamps, relighting pilot lights, winding the timers. Stevenson mourned the lamplighter’s impending fate from the imminent arrival of electric light, writing, “The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such a one; how he distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected it.” Greek myth or no, the modern lamplighter’s job is a popular one, with positions seldom changing hands.

      On a crisp December evening, I join two members of the British Gas team, Gary and Iain, at St. Stephen’s Tavern near Westminster Bridge, meeting amid the locals packed wall to wall, ties loosened СКАЧАТЬ