Candlelit

Friday morning I woke up early to the voice of an unsettling wind. Since I was planning to walk to work that day, I wondered whether the wind betokened rain; and once that thought had entered my head, it was impossible to get to sleep again. Since it was only half an hour before my alarm was supposed to go off, I got out of bed and looked out the front door: trees whipping, debris scampering, sound roaring from here to there, but no rain. Okay then. I sat down at the computer and was just about to check e-mail when the power went out. Then came on. Then went out. And this time, stayed out.

But one of the great things about home is how well you can maneuver in the dark. I made my way to the drawer with my wonderful LED flashlight, then dug out the candles and lit them. The time came for my alarm to go off but of course it didn't, because suddenly it wasn't that sort of a world anymore. It was a world where an atomic clock-linked alarm means nothing, and if I hadn't happened to awaken early I might have slumbered on long past my time--unless the deeper, more mysterious internal clock (which is frightfully accurate) had kicked in, which it probably would have.

I'm not sure how well I would take to a several-days outage (no TV? Aaaaghhh!), but for a morning, or a couple hours in the evening, it can be wonderful. (Although I remember an all-nighter back in Chicago at the height of summer when the only thing to do was get out of my boiling apartment and go to a movie--along with absolutely everyone else in the neighborhood.) Lighting a candle reminds me of what the world was like for almost all our history, before Mr. Edison had another of his fiendish ideas and transformed everything. For one thing, it reminds me how different the world is at night, or in those pre-dawn hours when the sun is still just a promise. The world is quieter at night, and it should be: something about night demands quiet, which is why loudmouths shouting on the Sunset Strip are so offensive. As a definitive Morning Person, my whole psyche is shackled to sunlight: when the sun comes up, I begin my day (alarm clocks really are almost beside the point); and when the sun goes down, it's only through the intervention of electric lights that I am able to fool myself into going on for a while--but as any of my friends can tell you, my head doesn't usually work as well once the sun sinks away, I'm not as productive, not as creative, not much good at much of anything, which is why so often I find the blinking lights of a TV set about all that interest me come nightfall.

Except, again, when the power goes off. I light a candle and the world is transformed: the light is not steady, it dances, and the shadows jump and twirl. Suddenly nothing is fixed, nothing is certain; and the front door seems less solid, and every sound is infused with meaning and danger. And you know what? All this is good for me; good for us. The electric light has made the world too certain, too knowable; we need a little more uncertainty in our lives.

Because certainty breeds security, and security breeds the need for more security. Once we feel safe, we get addicted to it and demand to feel yet more safe. Next thing you know, we're putting leashes on our children, sacrificing our freedoms and tolerating utter nonsense at our airports. If it weren't for electric light, we would not be so obsessed with tyrannical safety because safety (the electric illusion of it, not the real thing) would not be a constant; it (the real thing, not its glowing simulacrum) would be occasional, and fleeting, and we would know on a regular basis what it is to have that thrill of fear when something goes bump in the night.

(Our scary movies are almost never about the creatures of the night, and the music they make, not anymore; now they are more often about the ways in which our ordered society can break down and fall apart. Sociopaths and maniacs with saws, people who have stepped outside of ordered society and brought their knives with them.)

So I lit my candles, ignored the television, and did some reading. By candlelight, and by the growing sunlight of an unsual dawn, with the wind howling outside, as if to remind me, loudly and vigorously, that it can all be taken away. For more than just a morning, some day.