We need darknes. A National Geographic essay talked about how many countries and many cities in the world have started to kill the line between night and day so that “most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.”
We are diurnal animals, meaning that our eyes are built to receive the light of the sun. For us, therefore, as it is differently to the nocturnal ones, the difference between light and darkness is not simply a moral binary but a physical element in our life. What happens when night is as bright as day?
There is a world out there where darkness is a given at a certain time of the day. I just saw them when one time a whole fleet of bus got stuck for several hours on one side and another on the other. Even with all the lights from the buses and vehicles, the long road remained dark. It was as if Nature has ordained it to be so. Which is the reality. But that night, there was a moon, but it remained hidden behind this mast of clouds that were a mass of the darkest fluid covering the horizon. Then you could see this long silver strip of light softened by the rolling shape of the night clouds. I was not aware of this anymore: that clouds could be seen at night and they can be lovely and they can be scary.
In the big city, I look up – if I ever find to look up – and see a monochrome of dome reflecting what would be the surplus of lights coming from the artificial torches of buildings and streetlights. The National Geographic essay maintains that we make unnecessary lights. When all we need to construct are lights that make us see, we push up the direction of these lighting contraptions and aim them upwards. Where they are not needed.
We always engineer ourselves out of Nature and create a world that we feel is much better than that we have seen upon arrival. Our reengineering, if we are to believe science, is not always properly bringing us to the new dawn. In lighting up the homes and the surrounding, we begin to lengthen the day. We change our habits or our skills in technology begin to change our habits. We can meet at night and cancel our needed hours of sleep. We begin to crave for food and there is always the opportunity to buy something from the 24-hour store. The dictionary has come up for a name for these stores: convenience stores.
Does anyone still remember that “lugawan” at Barlin which was open 25 hours? That is the desire created in us that started in the brightening of lights and the manipulation of the night. For days, I kept thinking how there could be 25 hours. I started comparing the possibility of another 1 hour from the tradition of 24.
Don’t laugh now but that 25-hour “lugawan” was ahead of the National Geographic article by many years. We would keep awake and the allowed hours are not even enough. Just one more hour to cheat the criminal brevity of mere 24 ticking hours.
Coming home again one weekend, I woke up with the bus slashing through the rain. I was seated up front and I could see kilometers of towns and huts asleep. There were no street lamps to give them the illusion of light and day. The mountains in the distance were dull, sad black, nothing to give you their verdant color at day. You could not see an animal move its head. The somber air assured you even the birds were snoring.
Small birds are easily the victims of the world gone full daylight. They crash into street lamps thinking they are merely bright paths on the horizon. Some species migrate earlier because the lights are deluding them. The mating habits of other animals are distorted by the absence of darkness. As for human beings, we should be careful to go into the light, for we may be just seduced by the warm light of a fluorescent device.