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Although light alone won't change everything, bringing it to places such as Guinea will ensure more than illumination. The darkness can be mitigated with solar flashlights and lanterns, as well as other innovations that allow adults to work and travel after dark and children to study. For the Huichol Indians of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, who live burrowed deep in rugged, sparsely settled terrain, new lighting technology has made a distinct, practical difference in their lives. Architect Sheila Kennedy, in an attempt to alleviate the Huichol's isolation from modern illumination, devised the Portable Light system, which harvests and stores solar energy during the day, then offers up to eight hours of light at night. It consists of a rectangle of fabric with LED chips attached to one side. The fabric, coated with an aluminum film, reflects the light produced by the diodes. On the reverse side, two flexible solar panels are sewn onto the fabric, and these power a lithium battery stored in a small pocket on the corner of the fabric. Folded, the Portable Light becomes a shoulder bag, which the Huichol women can carry around during the day as it charges. When the sun goes down, the light, being flexible and weighing less than eight ounces, is easily adapted to different tasks. It can be spread out to serve as a reading mat, draped over the shoulders as a poncho, or rolled up and used as a flashlight.

As she fine-tuned the Portable Light for the Huichol, Kennedy also discovered something new and useful for American society: "Working in the so-called Third World, not only are we bringing people the benefits of a little power, we're also getting great ideas about how we can translate these technologies to our own countries.... The idea that we're going to have a top-down centralized system of lighting in our housing and architecture is an historically outdated idea." She and her partner, Frano Violich, have also designed the Soft House, named after Amory Lovins's idea of a soft path for energy—that is, diverse, local, renewable energy sources that match the scale and needs of the consumer. In this house, curtains, flexible walls, and translucent textile screens not only glow with light but also harvest solar energy. Although the Soft House is still in the experimental stage, Kennedy sees it as the path to the future:

Instead of a centralized grid, imagine a distributed energy network that is literally soft—a flexible network made of multiple, adaptable and co-operative light-emitting textiles that can be touched, held and used by homeowners according to their needs.... The 'soft house' demonstrates the daily experiences of living with textiles that generate power and emit light. Translucent movable curtains along the ... perimeter convert sunlight into energy throughout the day, shading the house in summer and creating an insulating air layer in winter. Folded downward, a central curtain establishes a habitable off-the-grid energy harvesting room. Folded upward, this luminous curtain becomes a suspended soft chandelier.

Not only do we need to imagine such solutions across cultures and across the globe, but we also need to think back to the past, to ask ourselves whether we are hampered more by brilliance than our ancestors ever were by the dark. It's not too much to imagine that a new night carved out of abundance might also be a time of great possibilities, when we might ask in our way, as Cyril of Jerusalem once did, "What [is] more helpful to wisdom than the night?" And it's not too much to imagine a night with room for more than mere brilliance will allow: the flowering of cockleburs and the warmth of cafés in evening; the safe passage of loggerhead turtles and skyscrapers figured anew; the stars above "more brilliant, more sparklingly gemlike ... opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires" and our own long-storied selves intimately at home in immensity.

Epilogue

Lascaux Revisited

THE LASCAUX