The End of Night? From The Starry, Starry Night to the Overpowering Street Light
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The Starry, Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889. |
For
nearly a year now, I have had the privilege of living and working in Grand Canyon
National Park. In late June, I was among some 1,100 attendees participating in
one of the four nights of the 24th annual Grand Canyon Star Party. Astronomers from across
the United States, operating nearly 50 telescopes that were set up behind the
Visitors’ Center, invited folks to get a glimpse of the planets in our own
solar system as well as nebulae and star clusters sitting millions upon
millions of light years distant from us.
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The Milky Way. NASA image. |
The evening took me back to my childhood in Massachusetts
where I spent many, many nights out under the stars looking up at a resplendent
Milky Way. I am heartbroken to note that, if I were to return to the town of my
birth today, it's more than unlikely that I would catch even a fleeting glimpse
of that Milky Way. Eight out of ten Americans today won’t ever live where they
can see their own galaxy, their own solar system. More than two-thirds of Americans and
Europeans no longer experience real night—that is, real darkness—and nearly all
of us in the world live in areas considered polluted by light.
Readers of The Rockery may not know that I am the host of an Internet program, On the Road with Mac and Molly, which is aired on the Pet Life Radio network. In Episode 31 of the series, I chat with Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night, about the
disintegration of what is natural into what is artificial. I believe this book to be of critical importance so I am mentioning it here. Bogard, in The End of Night, opens our eyes to how much we are losing cooped up, as we are,
under a perpetual glare.
At one point in the book, Bogard tells of a visit to the
Museum of Modern Art in New York where, he suggests, one can see “real
darkness.” There, he notes, fifty million people each year pass by a painting
of “a small, dark town, a few yellow-orange gaslights in house windows, under a
giant swirling and waving blue-green sky.” In The Starry Night,
painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1889, we see our world “before night had been
pushed back to the forest and the seas, from back when sleepy towns slept
without streetlights.” The Starry Night is “an imagined sky
inspired by a real sky much darker than the towns we live in today.”
In a letter from the summer of 1888, Van Gogh described the
night sky he saw overhead during a visit to a French beach: “The deep blue sky
was flecked with clouds of a deeper blue 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 very 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.”
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Street Light, Giacomo Balla, 1909. |
For most of us today, when we can see stars, most of these
appear to be white so the idea that stars come in different colors seems wildly
impossible. But, Bogard insists that if one were to “gaze long enough in a
place dark enough that stars stand in clear three-dimensional beauty,” one would
“spot flashes of red, green, yellow, orange and blue.”
When Bogard made the
visit to MoMA, he was in search of not only The Starry Night but
also Giacomo Balla’s Street Light, a painting, dated 1909, that is
so little known that the museum doesn’t even keep it on display. While Van
Gogh’s painting depicts, what Bogard calls, “old night,” Balla’s is a painting
of “night from now on.” Bogard notes: "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?”
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Paul Bogard |
In his book and in Episode 31 of On the Road, we
travel with Bogard around the globe to find night where it still lives…showing
exactly what we’ve lost, what we have left and what we might hope to regain. We
hear how the loss of night is not only a loss of beauty above us. More
light at night does not, as some insist, ensure greater safety and security;
properly designed light at night does. Exposure to artificial light at
night has been cited as a factor in health concerns ranging from poor sleep to
cancer. Light pollution is also threatening the health of the world’s
ecosystems as everything from reproduction cycles to migration patterns are
adversely affected by artificial light at night. But there is hope. Light
pollution is one kind of pollution we can readily fix. And, as the jacket cover
of the book proclaims: Bogard's "panoramic tour of the night, from its
brightest spots to the darkest skies we have left gives us every reason to flip
the switch—tonight."
Here’s a link to the show:
http://www.petliferadio.com/ontheroadep31.html and a link to a short clip
featuring Paul Bogard introducing the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkIdOqu53XA.