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Throughout the decades of Dan Flavin's career, the connections essential to his work became more and more dubious, and not only because of power outages. By 1973 the economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan relied on abundant, cheap oil. It fueled an insatiable car culture, yes, but oil was also essential to the energy grids of industrialized countries. For instance, it accounted for 20 percent of the fuel used for electricity generation in the United States. "Oil had become the lifeblood of the world's industrial economies," Daniel Yergin observed, "and it was being pumped and circulated with very little to spare. Never before in the entire postwar period had the supply-demand equation been so tight." Not only was there little to spare, but a good share of the oil consumed by the West and Japan was imported from the Middle East, and when Saudi Arabia instigated an oil embargo in the fall of 1973 in response to American arms shipments to Israel, fuel supplies tightened throughout the world. By December the price of oil, which sold on the world market for under $6 a barrel in early October, had nearly tripled in price.

Suddenly, as the country headed into winter, the "liberty poles" so valued by American farmers, and which seemed so strong and enduring in the landscape, proved to be entirely vulnerable. To conserve existing fuel supplies, President Richard Nixon, in addition to calling for restrictions on heating fuel and gasoline and setting lower speed limits on the interstates, called for the conservation of electricity. Specifically, Nixon called for the dimming of nonessential lighting such as advertisements and all decorative Christmas lights, both public and private, including the lights in New York City's Times Square. Although the electricity required for decorative lighting accounted for only 2 to 3 percent of all energy consumption in New York City, and lighting in general was responsible for about 6 percent of energy use nationwide, officials hoped that the dimming of such lights would encourage citizens to conserve energy in their own homes. "It's very sad to be a party to darkening a city so renowned for its lights—it's just heartbreaking," the municipal service administrator for New York City commented. "But it has a psychological effect, because it's difficult to get someone to turn down his thermostat if he sees lights blazing in a public place."

Although the shared and the celebratory—the flamboyant lights of advertising and the seasonal lights of the holidays—may seem to be the most dispensable of things in practical times, they draw our eyes out of the sea of lights we live in, and they take on outsize significance when doused, as if something essential has been taken away from the culture, especially in winter, when artificial light has always had its greatest meaning. And in 1973 their dimming did mean that something essential had been taken away, something larger than sheer illumination: the assumption that we could live without thinking about energy, that we could take it all for granted.

Writer Jonathan Schell understood that the damped-down world of the oil embargo was also a world whose underpinnings had profoundly changed: "This winter as the nation sits in its dimmed, chilled, living rooms watching the comet Kohouteck, which is due to appear in our heavens soon (it will be our finest Christmas ornament this darkened season)...the newly recognized global limits of natural resources ... force us and the Arabs and Europeans and the Japanese and all the rest of the peoples on the planet into dependence on one another. In the last analysis, the rationing we need is global."

And yet if the solution seemed to be global, it could also be personal. Who could blame some for wanting out, for following Helen and Scott Nearing back to the land and into "the Good Life," as did thousands of city dwellers in the late 1960s and early 1970s? The back-to-the-land movement was a response not only