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| Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, 1888. |
For nearly a year now, I’ve 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 country, 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.
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. Two-thirds
of Americans and Europeans no longer experience real night—that is, real
darkness—and nearly all of us live in areas considered polluted by light.
In Episode 31 of On the Road with Mac and Molly, I chat with
Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night, about the disintegration of what is natural into what is artificial. In this critically important book, Bogard 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.”
To 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.”
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| Street Light, Giacomo Balla, 1909. |
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).
