Night 1

Excerpt from Arthur Krystal's book, At Days Close: Night in Times Past.

 

Today, those who live far from the tips of the earth, where it is continuous night half the year, rarely find themselves in the dark.  Unless you're hacking your way through jungle or humping along in the desert, some form of artificial lighting, either a light bulb or an LEDis sure to be nearby.  Electric light is so much a staple of modern life that we forget that there are people  around whose parents relied on only two sources of light: the sun and fire.  Thomas Edison's bright idea of 1879 notwithstanding, many homes, until the second or third decade of the 20th century, were lit by small flames burning in gas

lamps. In terms of radiant power, then, the Dark Ages lasted a lot longer than you may have thought.

 

How dark was it?  Let's put it this way: an electric current coursing through a tunsten filament in a small glass vacumn produces a hundred times the light emitted by a candle or oil lamp. And, considering that no European cities deployed any kind of public lighting before 1650, the world atnight was no place to take a stroll.  Moonless nights presented a darknesss so complete that anyone bold enough to step into Shakespeare's "vast sin-concealing chaos" was at risk of losing his footing, his purse, and his life. Carriages tumbled into ditches;  houses were broken into or set on fire; and town squares

filled up with beggars, prostitutes, crooks, and the crooked.  In many cities, gangs roamed the streets. In 1606, a gangbanger by the name of Caravaggio killed a rival in Rome and fled to Naples.  In London, young rakes, with such high-sounding names as the Scowrers, the Mohocks, and the Hectors, staked out territory and busted heads. (It's the street gang, not the noble Trojan, to which we owe the verb "to hector.") As Ekirch sees it, the night was "a forbidding place plagued by pestilential vapors, diabolical spirits, nbatural calamity, and human depravity." No wonder that the Italian proverb admonished, "Who goes out at night looks for a beating."

 

to be continued. . . .