The Beauty of Darkness

Be it in real or in metaphor, always being within reach of having everything illuminated or lighting the lamp of knowledge to drive away ignorance, we've moved away from the mystery and beauty of darkness. 

In fact when you think about it, you'll see that most of us might have never experienced complete natural darkness. Sure we might sleep in a dark room, but that's like artificial dark. It's like experiencing  artificial day light ...see what I mean? Pretty absurd, right?

Henry Beston writes about this beautifully in his book The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod . He actually lived an year in a cottage by the sea.

                                         

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than night. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of the night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of the stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night.

Beston describes one particularly poetic night, made pitch-black by the embrace of a thick fog,  a night unseen by most of us, and perhaps one even unseeable a century of rabid illumination later. And yet his writing alone transports us to this glorious dominion of darkness, making its magic maybe, just maybe, a little more attainable for us nightless moderns:

"Night is very beautiful on this great beach. It is the true other half of the 

day's tremendous wheel; no lights without meaning stab or trouble it; 

it is beauty, it is fulfillment, it is rest. Thin clouds float in these heavens, 

islands of obscurity in a splendor of space and stars: 

the Milky Way bridges earth and ocean...

It was dark, pitch dark to my eye, yet complete darkness, I imagine, 

is exceedingly rare, perhaps unknown in outer nature. The nearest 

natural approximation to it is probably the gloom of forest 

country buried in the night and cloud. 

When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the 

heavens and the universe,  a new door opens for the human spirit, 

and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the 

mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment 

of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world 

islanded in its stream of stars, pilgrims of mortality, voyaging 

between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. 

Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, 

ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, 

and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience. ''

It's text and not poetry, but I thought it was pretty enough to be formatted differently :)

Wishful thinking might be, but I'd really like to visit one of those sky without city light kind of places, and maybe lightening by the sea...that's been a longstanding desire. Anybody interested?