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The lights were never held on a particular spot for longer than twenty seconds, and at the end of each take they were turned up to the ceiling or down to the floor, causing the image to fade into darkness.... After shooting it was advisable not to light the lamps for a little while in order to allow the slight rise in temperature caused by the bodies and the quartz lamps ... to disperse.

Our precision lenses sometimes surpassed the powers of perception of the naked eye, bringing out details which were only just discernible, particularly in the painted surfaces and around the figures.... At first it seemed that it would be impossible to film with so little light ... but in actual fact the opposite proved to be true.... Our modest resources and the restricted lighting that was permitted made us take a new cinematic approach to the art on the cave walls.... We had to use swift, precise and spontaneous takes, the camera moving forward through the dark cave and disclosing the space as it emerged.... This slow unfolding of the images in the silence of the cave took us to the edge of another world ... and we ourselves gradually began to feel like initiates.... The Upside-down Horse curves round a pier and the Great Black Auroch makes use of the curious relief of its concave niche: when it is seen at an angle from the end of the Gallery, only its head is visible; the body is concealed behind a projection in the rock and is only revealed when one moves towards it.... We noticed all this as we advanced, lamps in hand, along the wall toward the back of the cave. The painted figures emerged gradually from their hiding-places in the rock and this movement made them seem to come alive.... To the members of my team and myself, Lascaux became a sort of second homeland.

PART IV

Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world.

—VLADIMIR NABOKOV,

Pale Fire

Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light.

—RALPH ELLISON,

Invisible Man

17. Blackout, 1965

...we have built the great cities; now

There is no escape.

— ROBINSON JEFFERS,

"The Purse-Seine"

THE RURAL ELECTRIFICATION PROGRAM slowed to a near halt when supplies and manpower were redirected to fighting World War II, but once hostilities ceased, the electrification of the American countryside resumed. By 1960, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rural Electric Administration, 96 percent of American farms were connected to electric lines. The average rural customer used about 400 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month, compared with the 1935 average of 60 to 90 kilowatt-hours per month. Although farms continued to disappear, rural lines connected more and more people as potato and beet fields, pastures, apple orchards, and orange groves were plowed under and turned into suburban neighborhoods. With the advent of nuclear energy, it was rumored that electricity would become too cheap to meter.

During these postwar years, the U.S. power industry remained stable. The New Deal regulations were still in place, and the industry grew at a steady 7 to 8 percent per year. The utility companies had come to be thought of as natural monopolies, and the power grid had reached a size and significance that could never have been imagined in the late nineteenth century, when a writer at Harper's, commenting on the accomplishment at Niagara, declared, "It is scarcely to be expected that current can be brought as far as New York [City] to commercial advantage." Individual power stations, including Niagara, had now grown to serve areas that could encompass entire states, and not one of them stood alone: each was connected to, and might borrow from, a host of others in an electric grid. The point of generation was often far from the point of demand, and the interlacing corridors of long-distance wires that cut through rough, quiet, country linked farms, cities, and suburbs—places with