Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [33]
What drew him in? Could it have been the kerosene lamp? Was there something amorous in the fly’s infiltration? Or was it simply that he had mistaken our room for the darkness outside?
Either way, the speculation was intriguing. It suggested that, just as the cessation of mechanical noise opened the air to soothing sounds and the removal of technological efficiency made way for natural rhythms, so did the absence of artificial glare invite the play of natural illumination—a performance in light. Yet here again, the phenomenon was not merely an absence but a presence.
We had never noticed stars in Boston, but now they spread across the sky in their full celestial glory. The firefly was but a small star, in terms of brightness, and when we opened the door and followed it outside, this star was released to a galaxy of stars, into which it blended almost imperceptibly. Starlight, when congregated, was enough to light your way to the garden for a midnight snack. Imagine opening your kitchen cupboard and grabbing a handful of cookies under the glow of two billion stars.
Stars were not the only handy visual aids. Early in the morning, accompanied by the lauds of the rooster, another made its appearance. Pale at first, slanting across the floor and spreading along our sheets, then pressing against our closed eyelids, it roused us from sleep almost as gently as starlight had lulled us into it.
Kerosene lamps were useful not so much for what they did as for what they didn’t do: obliterate a system of timed illumination nature long ago instituted, perfectly good for lulling us to sleep and waking us up. (Researchers have discovered that the sun activates a chemical in the brain to rouse us.) At most these demure sources of light took nature’s circadian idea and embellished upon it. A glowing oil lamp is but a vessel of concentrated starlight; its flicker but a domesticated firefly. At best it can prolong natural light but a little. When one’s eyes begin to dry up and one’s lids to droop, nature takes over. The bedtime cue has prevailed. (I will admit that sometimes I cheated a little by setting a mirror up next to my lamp to double its output, but I paid the price when the sun came out on schedule the next morning.)
The Minimites, we found, supplemented their kerosene lamps with flashlights. We were surprised at first. But in time, we too saw the need. Without robbing us of the magic and economy of kerosene, they proved handy in the middle of the night when you needed to get up quickly for any reason: going to the bathroom, checking out a strange noise on the porch (some noises were stranger than others), tending a wailing animal. From a distance a farmer carrying a flashlight in the darkness looks like a firefly.
Mary and I, in any event, preferred the sparks of an amorous firefly to those of a shorting fusebox—or nervous system.
And lolling by the light of the flickering lamp, I relished one additional perception: here was another contribution to leisure. Now that we had so much more time, the built-in cycle of daylight and dusk saved us some of the chore of managing it.
The signs of an elegant fit between the natural order and human well-being revealed themselves fleetingly, then faded into the background. You had to pay attention or you’d overlook them. In truth, it was all too tempting to enjoy the effects without acknowledging the source. In the dreamy world of twilight, it was even possible to think you were imagining things. It might have been that our machine-starved minds were hallucinating.
But if so, we were not alone. Occasionally our neighbor, Mr. Miller, used odd terms that at first I didn’t catch, like “fast time” and “slow time.” Whenever I set an appointment with him, or inquired after the time, I had to remember to specify which kind I meant. I learned that “fast time” referred to the modern convention of “daylight savings,” whereby workers are artificially