The night sky of my youth was a middling gray. In the suburban North Dallas neighborhood where I lived, there were of course the street lights outside, but across a nearby road there was also a supermarket and a good-sized city park, both lit up by multiple tower lights all night long. The night sky in those years had no chance of being anywhere near black. You would turn off the lights indoors, walk out of the house, and, if anything, it would be a good deal lighter outside than in. The north star I remember seeing, and maybe a few others from time to time, but generally all I saw was the darkling gray haze of light. Along with what we had come to call the light pollution, there was a parallel aural phenomenon: the night was never silent. Our relatively prosperous, leafy bedroom community lay far from any actual industry, but the ambient noise of combustion engines crawling all over town and on the nearby freeways was unceasing.

What a relief it was in those days just to close the door on the noise, and shut the blinds against the electric gray. Indoors, we could make things quieter, darker, establishing an artificial escape from the enlightened din of the city. And yet, even within, things were rarely completely dark or quiet: we generally left a lamp on somewhere, and there were always a certain number of operating lights, tiny points of red or green or yellow, indicating the steady flow of electricity through all our nested appliances. The refrigerator hummed, the clocks ticked, the A/C shuddered intermittently.

I say all of this comfortably in the past tense, but of course I still live in it today. The absence of true dark is one of the facts of our world, and even though I now live in a small, rural community with fewer street lights and not so many vast, lit-up parking lots, there is still enough electric light to be a nuisance. There is still a darkless world outside. The grayscape is intentional: it works as a door to close against the fullness of a night where, after all, bad things happen to good people, and the unseen yet disturbs us. At night we are doubly walled in, first inside our microcosmic houses, but then also within the slightly bigger, duller cosmos of our grayscale cities. It all seems snug, in the way the Biosphere 2 seemed snug to schoolchildren in the Nineties, or snug like the International Space Station seems snug, a carefully maintained breathing space hurtling through the outer dark. But inside the protective dome of electric light, as we know, everything is not okay. There rises a tidal sea of melancholy, for multiple, no doubt interconnected reasons—and one of them must be the door shut against the night sky. It is Hell, as Dante knew long ago, to be unable to see the stars.

The first hint of the problem comes in bed. Many adults have a hard time falling asleep; many rely on medication. The problem is multicausal, but there are indications that the dome of undarkness has something to do with it. Consider what happens when we go camping. In spite of our best efforts at bringing the light and noise of our domestic comforts out to the campground, we still end up getting some good, deep darkness and quiet—and that is of course why we are there. Walking through the campground at twilight, you can hear the gravel crunch underfoot. Around among the pine trunks, a few fires glimmer, and the campers around them lower their voices in the hush. Without artificial light, it is hard not to think of sleep earlier, but the quiet hour beforehand is precious. We sit amid the dirt of the state park, perched on lousy camp chairs, because there is something in the quiet dark we need like we need water. Having drunk from that source, we find the sleep we desire more easily.

I remember my first time, as an adult, really seeing the stars. It was the year after high school graduation and I was out of the city, up in the Flathead Valley of Montana, south of Glacier National Park. On an empty field an hour or two after nightfall, I lay surrounded by the sky. The nearest electrical lights were far off, undistracting. The black depth of ambient space was filled to bursting with points of light, swarming, clustering, spreading across my vision. It was not the dull suffusion of the city sky, but a miracle of distinctness, millions of bright gems against lush black velvet. As time compressed into that long moment, the curve of the earth beneath me fell away, and the night sky enveloped all living things. I did not create this sky.

Now, the obvious question is why anyone would ever want to shut the door against this night. There are the more superficial answers, of course. We erect the dome for the sake of efficiency, because commerce, after all, must go on at all hours. We light up the dark for the sake of safety, so that thieves and other would-be transgressors can’t take advantage of us unawares. Or perhaps we just simply prefer seeing to not seeing. But these all boil down to an appetite for control, and a fear of all we cannot master. As much as we yearn, in our melancholy, for access to transcendent night, we cannot deny the thrill of fashioning our own artificial day. Like the demonic Mammon in Milton’s Paradise Lost, we are drawn to

                                                             seek
Our own good from our selves, and from our own
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp.

There are real costs to shutting out the dark, but like Mammon, we often conclude that “hard liberty” is well won. Truly, to live in the night means relinquishment, and dependency—it means accepting our neediness as finite creatures, and opening ourselves to a grace that is not ours to grasp. To a person with one hand on the light switch, that is a tall order.

Thankfully, this too shall pass, and the choice will not always lie with us. Our aging electrical grid has begun to favor us with longer power outages in recent years: last winter, we in southern Michigan were blacked out for a week at least, huddling around our fireplaces for warmth and meager, flickering light. I remember how early we went to bed, exhausted with camping out in our own houses, ready to give ourselves up to the night. As Saint Augustine said to God many centuries ago, “all those who wander far away” in sin and disorder “are imitating you, but in a perverse way.” It is a “shady parody of omnipotence” we carry out when we try to exert domineering control. “Yet,” adds the saint, “by this very mimicry they”—we—“proclaim that you are the Creator of the whole of nature.” Even in our failure to construct an alternative cosmos, with its own dominant constellations, we bear witness to the One who holds the true night of all things lovingly in His creative hands. On our best nights, we fall back into what we have, after all, always known: that the one mystical light shines in our darkness even now, and the darkness has not overcome it.

This column appeared in the Trinity 2024 issue of The Lamp.