Pt. 1 of 2: The Discovery of The Dark Side

Sometimes life’s small serendipities assume outsized significance, whether as result of circumstance, or timing, or other factors not as easily reduced to a word or idea. Part of my cargo for India included a fair amount of reading material, as drawing from my previous experiences in Africa, I anticipated having an excess of free time that couldn’t be filled by television, DVDs, chatting on the phone, or any of the other more or less mindless activities in which we fritter away large portions of our lives. I looked forward to the prospect of devoting more time to reading; like most people, I do far less of it than I would like. My portable library is dominated by books, but I did jam several back issues of magazines into my backpack before departing. Owing largely to my habit of reading issues cover to cover, I tend to develop backlogs in my subscriptions, and so leaving the country afforded an excellent opportunity to get caught up: I would have ample time to read the old issues without new ones arriving by mail to bear witness to the futility of my effort. Given that the New Yorker is a weekly publication, it has proven particularly difficult to stay current with (I used to pray for double issues). Hence, four issues of the magazine accompanied me to India.

During perhaps my second week in Udaipur, I encountered an article in the August 20 issue called “The Dark Side,” written by a man named David Owen (you can access it here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen). I am in the habit of clipping and filing away articles—whether newspaper or magazine—that strike me as especially fascinating, profound, or well-written, and upon finishing the issue, I tore “The Dark Side” out immediately. As with some of the best New Yorker feature writing, it took a relatively mundane or marginal subject—in this case, light pollution—and made it seem startlingly immediate, substantial, and, in a word, vital, all the while maintaining that elegant but understated, equable New Yorker style to which all reportage should aspire. It shocked with simple facts, not with alarmist tone or fiery rhetoric or by conjuring dystopian imagery. Just facts: the brightest feature in the nighttime sky visible from the Grand Canyon is the lights of Las Vegas, 175 miles away; in a sky absent of light pollution, Venus, Jupiter, and the Milky Way are all bright enough to cast shadows; “in a truly dark sky, shooting stars are too numerous to bother wishing on.” My connection with the last was immediate, almost visceral: during my most profound experience of the heavens, while making final ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I marveled at the frequency of shooting stars, which seemed to tracer the sky every time I had occasion to gaze upward.

Owens’ thesis: “Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder,” is powerfully argued, and not merely for the marshalling of dismal facts: his evocation of the experience of a truly dark sky, glimpsed at Bryce Canyon National Park in the desert of southern Utah, had a transporting and stirring effect on me. I put down the magazine and stepped out into the Indian night, which would surely reveal a sky that shamed the dim American firmament. But Udaipur is a city after all, and a fairly sizable one by American standards—nearly 600,000 people live here. The sky hardly revealed more than I might expect to see in a middling American city, and a good deal less than I might observe from my parent’s yard in rural northern Indiana. I was disappointed, though not crushed.

After coming to India, I formed both the idea and hope that I might establish an acute, fundamental, and enduring appreciation for the simplest of things: the taste of a chocolate bar, for example, rendered novel and especially delectable for its relative scarcity, or the physical experience of a city hemmed in by hills. India lay before me, I thought, its charms, its horizons, its forms and features and cultural incarnations inevitably less debased, purer than those of America. India promised to be a wilder, simpler world. And so it is, I think, in many ways. But it also has a population three-and-a-half times greater than that of the U.S. dispersed over an area less than one-half of that of the forty-eight contiguous states. All manner of pollution has taken tenacious hold here and will likely worsen with time: the sky, like the rivers, the forests, and the city streets alike, is compromised by human activity in many places.

The night sky—what could be a pleasure more basic than that? I had practically forgotten about the existence of stars after four years of city dwelling. Only, as should have been obvious before I rushed out-of-doors in a dumb swoon, Indian cities are heavily illuminated, just as American cities are, just as most cities in the world are, for that matter. Perhaps this fundamental human pleasure, reawakened with such fervor by David Owens’ writing, would be scuttled before it could become a regular source of joy and comfort and wonder. I still held out hope that Udaipur harbored some brilliant stargazing redoubt, perhaps on a hillside facing away from the city. But how would I ever find it?