Plus de lumière: A Few Words on Darkness

by Andrew Kingston

Alley at night in Bangor, Maine. Photographed by the author.

[…] non pour vous engager à un long discours, mais seulement afin qu’en peu de mots vous me donniez un peu plus de lumière de la nature de la lumière […]

– Letter from Jean-Baptiste Morin to René Descartes, 1638^[1]

[…] all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper […]

– Herman Melville, from Moby Dick, Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”^[2]

From the Bible to the Big Bang, our world so often seems to have begun in the abyss of night. Yet humanity has also consistently defined itself against this abyss, both physically and metaphysically, in terms of our insatiable craving for light. What follows tells the story of how a certain darkness nevertheless persists at the heart of such a desire for illumination, transforming itself and being transformed across history as the shifting condition for various kinds of knowledge and experience. Told through five loosely interwoven vignettes—on theology, poetry, science, technology, and politics—this story will explore how nocturnal figures have come to play active roles in humanity’s endless quest for sight and insight, exceeding the simple absence of light to which they are often supposed to refer. A.C. Swinburne once wrote that “night is one, and her shape the same,”^[3] suggesting that darkness is always a uniform and unchanging phenomenon; but pace Swinburne, we will find that night is in fact many, and that the shape it takes at any given moment is essential to how and what we see.

Theology

When Saint John of the Cross wrote his mystical poem on the dark night of the soul, he inverted the dominant paradigm in the West that privileges light as a central metaphor for knowledge. Against this metaphor and its imperatives of perpetual enlightenment, its conception of a truth that will always be encountered as unveiling or revelation, his work asks us to reconsider our relationship to darkness. It shows us that what appears dark is not always waiting for some new light to fall upon it, that what seems obscure is not always in need of further clarification.

We can see this inversion most directly when, halfway through Dark Night, one of the theological treatises that he based on his poem, John pauses to provide some philosophical justifications for his decision to emphasize darkness in the first place, in the context of a broader exploration of humanity’s relationship to the divine. In doing so, he explains that this relationship to the divine must necessarily be wrapped in darkness from our point of view because of how greatly God’s infinite nature exceeds our finite ability to apprehend it. To reinforce this idea, he appeals to Aristotelian logic^[4] and argues that, in general, “divine things which are bright and clear in themselves naturally seem all the more hidden and dark to the soul.”^[5] Then he goes on to unpack this claim by way of two brief analogies:

the brighter the light, the more it will darken and blind the pupils of the owl;

and

the more fully the sun is observed, the more darkness it causes, exceeding and destroying the weaker faculty of sight.^[6]

God is too bright and so darkens our vision like a metaphorical sun when we look in its direction, in a play between insight and blindness which would seem to confirm Jacques Derrida’s claim that philosophy’s “[h]eliotropic metaphors are always imperfect.”^[7] Yet John undoubtedly chose this image precisely because of its imperfection, because all it can do is gesture toward the apophatic incompleteness of our understanding. In this sense, the metaphor turns out to be perfect in its imperfection. And since it is derived from the same logic, the idea of the dark night of the soul reveals itself to be similarly contradictory: its darkness is less the sign of any absence of light than a symptom of the latter’s overwhelming unpresentability; it is the effect of an oxymoronic luminosity that obscures rather than clarifies, which John goes on to describe in terms of the “ray of darkness” of Pseudo-Dionysius and other mystics.^[8]

Faced with this “dark radiance,” as Hans Urs von Balthasar elsewhere calls it,^[9] our limited conceptions of the divine can only fail in their shortsighted attempts to grasp or even delimit it as an object of the intellect. And so John’s work asks how we might instead learn to dwell with this infinite blind spot, rather than treating it as a problem to be solved; he thus constantly and counterintuitively redirects his reader’s gaze toward its own undoing, toward a shroud of “[c]louds and thick darkness” (according to the Psalms^[10]) within which any possible knowledge will be both grounded and dissolved. In the end, John’s God can only be found by staring into this abyss, which “enlightens with its darkness” when it stares back.^[11]

Tracing out the legacy of the aporias described in works like Dark Night and the Ascent of Mount Carmel alone would take us to countless other places both in and far beyond the history of Christian literature. John is cited by Georges Bataille, for instance, as a major influence on the latter’s twentieth-century atheological poetry and philosophy of non-knowledge, which similarly seeks to “fall in this dark unknown;”^[12] and more recently, the idea of a “dark night of the soul” has also been borrowed in part by certain Western Buddhist psychologists.^[13] But of course many equally rich conceptual uses of night can be found endogenously across several other spiritual traditions as well, such as in Ibn ‘Arabî’s mystical treatment of shadow—as described in the Quran’s Surah Al-Furqan (25: 45), for example.^[14] Or, as Toshihiko Izutsu interestingly argues,^[15] Ibn ‘Arabî’s ideas might be compared with yet another family of mysteries, announced in the multiplying darknesses (玄之又玄) toward the end of the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching.^[16] Then there is the “black flame” of medieval Kabbalah,^[17] and on and on. Each of these specific darknesses are theologically unique, to be sure, and certainly no one of them is reducible to the others; but each also lends its own shade to the picture of a more pervasive nocturnal archetype or enigma that unites them, at—or as—the limit of what we see and know.

Poetry

Responding to the enigma posed to us by night became almost an obsession for the European Romantic poets, writing in the shadow of the Enlightenment. And the Night Thoughts of the eighteenth-century Anglican poet Edward Young is more or less the prototype of this obsession. Much like John’s writing (and later, that of Novalis), Young’s book-length poem uses nocturnal imagery to offer a kind of religious instruction, once more describing a night that in its own way enlightens, that “[e]ven in the Zenith of her dark Domain, / [i]s Sun-shine, to the colour of my Fate.”^[18] But Night Thoughts takes the abyssal structure of its night much more literally than John does, frequently presenting it in terms of the great void of outer space:

How shall the stranger Man’s illumin’d Eye,
In the vast Ocean of unbounded Space,
Behold an Infinite of floating Worlds
Divide the Crystal Waves of Ether pure,
In endless Voyage, without Port? […]^[19]

When compared with the overwhelming infinity of the universe, Young at one point even identifies our own “sublunary World” as a little more than an Ecclesiastes-like “Vapour” suspended temporarily in the nocturnal rift,

From the damp Bed of Chaos, by Thy [God’s] Beam
Exhal’d, ordain’d to swim its destin’d Hour
In ambient Air, then melt, and disappear.^[20]

The whole poem is basically structured around a series of similar memento mori, articulated alongside reflections on the universe’s grandeur and sublimity, which Young ultimately deploys as a premise for apologetics.

A proliferation of all kinds of night poems eventually followed in the wake of these religious Night Thoughts,^[21] and so, naturally, many later Romantic and post-Romantic writers also came to use the same sort of nocturnal imagery along very different lines, in order to explore the religion-shaped hole that was beginning to form in Western modernity. Heidegger thus describes the night already appearing in Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” as a kind of abyss (Abgrund) that must be constantly “experienced and endured” in a godless, groundless world.^[22] And the near-constant darkness of Georg Trakl’s early-twentieth-century poetry also seems to sit, perhaps less comfortably and more ambiguously than Heidegger would like, within this Nietzschean chasm. The title of his “Night Soul” (“Nachtseele”)^[23] and the apostrophization of a “dark night” (“Du dunkle Nacht”) in “Song to the Night,”^[24] for instance, practically ask to be read as secularized reinterpretations of John of the Cross. The opening lines of the latter poem are perhaps especially interesting in this regard, straddling the unstable border between faith and its contrary:

Born of the shadow of a breath
We wander in forsakenness
And founder in eternity,
Like sacrificial victims, unconscious of their consecration.
[…]
Like the blind, we listen in the silence
Into which our whispers faded.^[25]

Then there is the still more forsaken chiaroscuro illuminating the poetry of Baudelaire—as in “The Irredeemable,” where an ironic Luciferian glow only creates “an even blacker night.”^[26]

In each of these cases and in many more like them, the nights of a certain post-Enlightenment poetry give expression—whether theologically or atheologically—to another kind of darkness, one that represents less the negation of what we might know than the affirmation of a tragic knowledge, reflected in what Baudelaire calls the “dark, clear well of Truth.”^[27]

Science

Such abyssal thoughts are not only the province of mystics and poets, and in fact they had already been haunting the minds of scientists and philosophers for centuries before writers like Young or Trakl ever put pen to paper. Pascal, for example, marvels at our tininess and obscurity when compared with “that [orbit] encompassed by the stars revolving in the firmament.”^[28] As Derrida notes in a recently translated essay, this is the picture of a universe “whose infinite spaces scare Pascal.”^[29] Half-horrified and half-disgusted, Pascal goes on to describe humanity as hopelessly caught between the “two abysses of infinity and nothingness,”^[30] comparing our “entire visible world” to “an imperceptible line in the broad expanse of nature.”^[31] From this point of view, the sheer vastness of the universe overshadows and darkens any possibility that we might fully perceive or understand our place within it. Later in the Pensées, he elaborates on this tension^[32] between knowledge and darkness in even more explicit ways, at one point juxtaposing the “state of partial darkness” (un état à demi obscur) characteristic of empirical observation to a “total darkness” (obscurité totale)^[33] that Michel Le Guern, one of Pascal’s modern editors, identifies as a direct reference to the dark night of the mystics (John of the Cross et al.).^[34]

Still earlier, amid a discussion of Plato from his 1540 Narratio Prima—which introduced the world to the heliocentric ideas of his mentor Copernicus three years before the publication of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres—Georg Joachim Rheticus expressed his own concerns about our limited vision when confronted with the enormity of the heavens:

What powers of human intellect can truly investigate these divine things scattered so far from us that our eyes go dark? If God in his beneficence had not therefore instilled this heroic impulse in the astronomer—at times leading him by hand, so to speak, down a road inconceivable to human reason—I should hardly believe that he might be in any way luckier or more useful than a blind man […].^[35]

For Rheticus, as Arthur Koestler explores in other contexts,^[36] the astronomer’s heroic or even rebellious impulse (motus) is ultimately an unnatural one, inconceivable to human rationality on its own. In order to make any progress, then, Rheticus suggests that reason itself first requires a supplementary leap into the irrational—into either faith or foolishness, as Kierkegaard might say.^[37] Without making this leap, the astronomer will eventually find himself betrayed by his own observations and conceptual frameworks, which will forever fall short of what they attempt to describe: as Rheticus puts it, soon enough “he will feel himself no happier than Orpheus, who in his mind could indeed discern Eurydice following him” before her ghost “vanished from his sight and sunk down to Hell again” when he turned around demanding that his theory be confirmed.^[38]

It is almost as if these sixteenth-century lines were paraphrasing the much later Orphic ideas of Maurice Blanchot, who also describes a kind of “measureless” nocturnal knowledge that cannot be looked at “in the face.”^[39] Similarly, though at the onset of the Copernican Revolution, Rheticus depicts an astronomer-Orpheus who might endlessly scan the cosmic ocean and record every corner of existence on an enormous Borgesian map, though the fullness of its meaning will always escape him: no matter how much data he collects, his reason alone will simply never be in a position to comprehend the totality of what he wants to know, which in the end remains the province of a night that, at once literally and metaphorically, “holds everything in itself” (to borrow Rilke’s words).^[40] In refusing this limitation and insisting that his own ideas can encapsulate the universe, he comes to resemble a kind of mad scientist—a solipsist who, incapable of dwelling with the darkness beyond his own point of view, only ends up blinding himself in his ruthless attempts to see.^[41]

Technology

Around the same time as the Romantics were writing their night thoughts by lamplight, gas began taking over as the major source of artificial illumination in Europe, signalling the beginning of a technological revolution that would have an enormous impact on how people still understand and relate to darkness today. The use of gas lighting began in earnest as an industrial practice in Britain, driven primarily by a need to efficiently brighten the interior of factories:^[42] as Wolfgang Schivelbusch puts it, early gaslight was first “employed in a rational, economical way” in order to extend the working day and decouple it from the natural rhythms of light and dark.^[43] But such practices quickly moved from the factory to the streets, again in large part for economic reasons. In the same way that it had already extended the possibilities of labor, gas also helped to facilitate the continuation of shopping and spending into the evening, for which window displays were turned into scenes of nocturnal advertisement emulating the kinds of lighting techniques used in the theater.^[44]

Not unrelatedly, this technocommercial development evolved in concert with practices of policing and fantasies of panopticism as well.^[45] But beyond its connections with the histories of law enforcement and institutional discipline (a story which in fact begins centuries earlier^[46]), the spread of gaslight also came to suffuse the average civilian’s nocturnal habits with their own sort of investigative impulse. Whereas artificial light had once been viewed by Western publics with a certain suspicion, often as a symbol of royal or aristocratic power,^[47] many soon began to quite enthusiastically embrace its newer employment in the service of the bourgeoisie—democratizing and expanding the nocturnal gaze while at the same time turning the night itself into a kind of window display or quasi-voyeuristic theater for mutual surveillance and “pitiless publicity,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it.^[48] In an essay that rather dramatically embodies this transformation in attitudes, the nineteenth-century English journalist George Augustus Sala described how gaslight had come to guide the nocturnal flâneur

through the crooked ways of unseen life and death, of the doings of the great Unknown, of the cries of the great Unheard. He who will bend himself to listen to, and avail himself, of the secrets of the gas, may walk through London streets proud in the consciousness of being an Inspector—in the great police force of philosophy—and of carrying a perpetual bull’s-eye in his belt.^[49]

Night was thus increasingly opened to new forms of inspection and scrutiny, not only for the constabulary but also for any nineteenth-century urbanite, in whose eyes the nocturnal world became another kind of dark continent to be explored and mapped, a final temporal frontier for the light of progress.^[50]

Yet as artificial lighting rendered night on the boulevard more accessible, in the distance the sky at which Young and Pascal had wondered began to grow fainter. As one world was opened, another began to close. Van Gogh’s paintings famously documented and in some sense celebrated the early stages of this change, at a time when it was still realistic to include street lamps and stars in the same picture; one of his letters even describes how he had come to appreciate the ways in which gaslight provided interesting visual effects for him to paint—as opposed to the nights of country villages where he saw only blackness.^[51] But decades before Van Gogh was to paint works like Starry Night Over the Rhône or Café Terrace at Night, the French science writer Amédée Guillemin had already begun to notice how “the illumination from houses and streets”^[52] in populated areas was beginning to limit the amount of stars visible in the sky, giving an early description of a phenomenon that would eventually come to be known as “light pollution.” Indeed, even the much earlier Starry Night of Jean-François Millet seems possibly to include the faint glow of some city lights intruding at the bottom of its horizon.

Jean-François Millet, Starry Night (Nuit étoilée), c. 1850–65

Yale University Art Gallery. Public Domain.

With the spread of arc lighting and electricity in general, the “irreproachable glow” of the nineteenth-century gas and oil lamps described in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project was eventually “extinguished”^[53] in favor of a far brighter and more homogeneous kind of illumination, further contributing to the night’s disappearance from city centers. The subsequent explosion of electric light over the course of the twentieth century then exponentially accelerated and expanded this disappearance, such that some level of light pollution has today become the norm for most urban and suburban areas around the world, where true darkness is almost never experienced. Scientists finally began to study the deleterious effects of light pollution (for astronomy, ecology, human health, etc.) in the second half of the twentieth century, and since the 1980s organizations like DarkSky International have led important efforts to spread the word about light pollution and to preserve darkness as a natural resource; nevertheless, as of 2016, over 80% of the global population lived beneath light-polluted skies,^[54] and an even more recent study suggests that average sky brightness has been increasing at the shocking rate of nearly 10% per year.^[55] Now, in the major cities of the twenty-first century, only the very brightest stars and planets can be observed through the gray haze of the urban firmament. The rest, like Eurydice, have vanished.

Politics

In response to problems like these, the late John Sallis published an article in a recent issue of the Oxford Literary Review arguing that today it has become “incumbent on philosophy to give thought to the possibility of a politics that would guard the clarity of the sky, that is, of a politics of light.”^[56] Covering everything from satellites to dark matter, Sallis’s sensitive and compelling essay considers the philosophical underpinnings of how a community orients itself in relation to the light of the sun and the stars. It explores how, as the condition for the possibility of all visual appearance, the φῶς at the root of any phenomenology, light literally colors the way things show up for us. But precisely because of this fundamental “elementality,” as Sallis calls it, light and our uses for it also come to reflect the assumptions, priorities, and values that shape our world and its meanings: light can brighten the shop window and the factory floor, or its soft glow can be a source of reverie;^[57] it can function as a searchlight “in the great police force of philosophy,”^[58] or it can overwhelm and blind us. It is in relation to the last of these possibilities that we are reminded one last time of how,

[as] the sky comes ever closer to being nothing but sheer light, vision will become ever dimmer almost to the point of blindness. As Hegel responded to certain advocates of pure light, ‘In absolute clearness one sees, just as much and as little, as in absolute darkness.’ It is in face of this transformation of the sky and its severe consequences that a politics of light is called for.^[59]

Sallis ventriloquizes Hegel in this call to action, though we have seen how he might have chosen any number of other possible historical references to make his point. He might have just as easily recognized the aporias of Orpheus or John of the Cross in the postmodern sea of light refracting through our nocturnal atmosphere. There, miles above the earth, the mass enlightenment that once promised to cure us of our limited vision has only come to magnify the scope of our myopia—globalizing it, as it were. In a kind of Faustian bargain, we have cut ourselves off from the fathomlessness of the cosmos for the sake of better seeing and controlling what is close to us, scratching “No Exit” ever deeper in the leaden shell of the sky with every new LED streetlight or billboard. Never needing to look very far beyond our immediate surroundings, we download digital images from the James Webb telescope and share them on our phones, confident in our knowledge that we are now liberated from the primitive darkness of the past: such is the prejudice of our current politics of light. But in truth the night has only changed shape once more, and we have only exchanged one abyss for another.

1. Jean-Baptiste Morin, in Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes: Correspondance I, Avril 1622–Février 1638. Léopold Cerf, 1897, p. 540. Modified for modern spelling and typography. ↑

2. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick; or, The Whale. Penguin Books, 2003, p. 212. ↑

3. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Volume I: Poems and Ballads. Heinemann, 1919, p. 98. ↑

4. Cf. Posterior Analytics 71a–72a, for example. ↑

5. San Juan de la Cruz [Saint John of the Cross]. Obras de San Juan de la Cruz. Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1926, p. 381 (my translations): “[…] conviene suponer cierta doctrina del Filósofo, que dice que cuanto las cosas Divinas son en sí más claras y manifiestas, tanto más son al alma oscuras y ocultas naturalmente.” ↑

6. John, ibid.: “Así como de la luz, cuanto más clara es, más ciega y oscurece la pupila de la lechuza, y cuanto el Sol se mira más de lleno, más tinieblas causa en la potencia visiva y la priva, excediéndola por su flaqueza.” ↑

7. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, The Harvester Press, 1982, p. 250. ↑

8. John, ibid.: “Que por esta causa San Dionisio y otros místicos teólogos llaman a esta contemplación infusa rayo de tiniebla […].” Cf. Dionysius the Areopagite. The Mystical Theology. In On the Divine Names and The Mystical Theology. Translated by C.E. Rolt, Macmillan, 1920, pp. 191–201, esp. pp. 191–194; also Meister Eckhart, Commentary on Exodus. In Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher. Edited by Bernard McGinn, Paulist Press, 1986, pp. 41–146, esp. pp. 117–118; and Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing. Edited by Evelyn Underhill, Element Books, 1997, p. 59 and passim. ↑

9. Urs von Balthasar, Hans. Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Ignatius Press, 2003, p. 81. ↑

10. Psalm 97 (NRSV [Vulgate Psalm 96]). Vulgate version qtd. in John, ibid.: “[n]ubes, et caligo in circuitu ejus.” ↑

11. John, op cit. 74: “[…] con su tiniebla alumbra y da luz a la tiniebla del alma […]” ↑

12. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Translated by Allan Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 237. For discussions of Saint John of the Cross in Bataille, see Stuart Kendall’s introduction to The Poetry of Georges Bataille. Translated and Edited by Stuart Kendall, SUNY Press, 2018; and Thacker, Eugene. “Divine Darkness.” Speculative Medievalisms: Discography. Punctum Books, 2013, pp. 27–38. ↑

13. Lutkajtis, Anna. “Delineating the ‘Dark Night’ in Buddhist Postmodernism.” Literature & Aesthetics, vol. 29, no. 2. The University of Sydney, 2019, pp. 1–14. ↑

14. Ibn Al’Arabi. The Bezels of Wisdom. Translated by R.W.J. Austin, Paulist Press, 1980, pp. 120–127. See also Izutsu, Toshihiko. Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts. University of California Press, 1983, pp. 89–98. ↑

15. Izutsu, op cit. 393. ↑

16. Laozi, The Annotated Laozi: A New Translation of the Daodejing. Translated by Paul Fischer, SUNY Press, 2023, pp. 39–40. ↑

17. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Hermeneutics of Light in Medieval Kabbalah.” The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience. Edited by Matthew T. Kapstein, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 114. ↑

18. Young, Edward. Night Thoughts. Edited by Stephen Cornford, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 37. ↑

19. Young, op. cit. 153. ↑

20. Young, op cit. 222. ↑

21. Cf. Furst, Lilian R. “Lighting Up Night.” A Companion to European Romanticism. Edited by Michael Ferber, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 505–21. ↑

22. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row, 2001, p. 90. ↑

23. Trakl, Georg. Dichtungen und Briefe. Otto Müller Verlag, 1969, pp. 184–86 (my translations). ↑

24. Trakl, from “Gesang zur Nacht,” op. cit. 224. ↑

25. Trakl, op. cit. 223:

    “Vom Schatten eines Hauchs geboren
    Wir wandeln in Verlassenheit
    Und sind im Ewigen verloren,
    Gleich Opfern unwissend, wozu sie geweiht.
    […]
    Wie Blinde lauschen wir ins Schweigen,
    In dem sich unser Flüstern verlor.” ↑

26. Baudelaire, Charles. “L’Irrémédiable.” Les Fleurs du mal et autres poèmes. Garnier-Flammarion, 1964, p. 100–101 (my translations):

    “[…] les larges yeux de phosphore
    Font une nuit plus noire encore
    […]
    Tête-à-tête sombre et limpide
    Qu’un cœur devenu son miroir!
    Puits de Vérité, clair et noir
    Où tremble une étoile livide,
    Un phare ironique, infernal
    Flambeau des grâces sataniques,
    Soulagement et gloire uniques,
    —La conscience dans le Mal!”

    This essay is deliberately avoiding the traditional associations of darkness and night with evil, and Baudelaire’s general conception of darkness is not a simple moralization along these lines, either. ↑

27. Op cit. 100. ↑

28. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Edited by Michel Le Guern, Gallimard, 2004, p. 153 (my translations): “Qu’il [l’homme] regarde cette éclatante lumière mise comme une lampe éternelle pour éclairer l’univers, que la terre lui paraisse comme un point au prix du vaste tour que cet astre décrit, et qu’il s’étonne de ce que ce vaste tour lui-même n’est qu’une pointe très délicate à l’égard de celui que ces astres qui roulent dans le firmament embrassent.” ↑

29. Derrida, Jacques. “The Notion of World.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 46, no. 2. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, Edinburgh University Press, 2024, p. 123. ↑

30. Op. cit. 155: “[…] entre ces deux abîmes de l’infini et du néant […]” ↑

31. Op cit. 154: “Tout le monde visible n’est qu’un trait imperceptible dans l’ample sein de la nature.” ↑

32. For a good discussion of the tension between finitude and infinity, see Derrida’s recently translated “The Notion of World.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 46, no. 2. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, Edinburgh University Press, 2024. ↑

33. Op. cit. 464: “Je puis bien aimer l’obscurité totale, mais si Dieu m’engage dans un état à demi obscur, ce peu d’obscurité qui y est me déplaît, et parce que je n’y vois pas le mérite d’une entière obscurité, il ne me plaît pas.” ↑

34. Op. cit. 679 (Fragment 721, note 1). ↑

35. Rheticus, Georg Joachim. Narratio prima, Rhodus, 1540, p. 42 (my translations; original modified for modern spelling and typography): “Quid etenim humani ingenii vires ad divinas has res tamque a nobis dissitas procul, investigandas, quam caligantes oculi? Proinde nisi deus illi pro sua benignitate motus heroicos indiderit, & tanq[uam] manu per incomprehensibile alias rationi humanae iter, deduxerit, haud crediderim, ulla in re Astronomum caeco illo praestantiorem et feliciorem esse […]. Ubi autem rem secum recta reputarit via, se non beatiorem Orpheo esse sentiet, qui quidem animo suam se Euridicen sequi cernebat, cum ex orco saltabund[us] ascenderet: post vero, ut ad ora averni fuit perventum, quam maxime habere se sperabat, ex oculis iterum ad inferos delapsa evanuit.” ↑

36. Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Penguin Classics, 2014. For a discussion of a related passage in Rheticus, see pp. 139–40. ↑

37. Cf. Bennington, Geoffrey. “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 33, no. 1, 2011, pp. 103–27. ↑

38. Rheticus, ibid. ↑

39. Blanchot, Maurice. “The Gaze of Orpheus.” The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 171. ↑

40. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Das Studen-Buch. Insel Verlag, 1907, p. 8 (my translation): “Aber die Dunkelheit hält alles an sich: / Gestalten und Flammen, Tiere und mich.” ↑

41. Virgil writes of Orpheus’ madness: “Cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem, / Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes” (Georgics Bk. 4, ll. 488–89). P. Virgilii Maronis opera / Oeuvres de Virgile: Bucoliques et Géorgiques. Librairie Hachette & Cie, 1884, p. 287. On Orpheus’ ruthlessness, see “Eurydice,” in Doolittle, Hilda. Collected Poems of H.D. Liveright Publishing, 1940, pp. 74–80. ↑

42. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Angela Davies, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 16–17. ↑

43. Op. cit. 7–8. ↑

44. Schivelbusch, op. cit. 148. ↑

45. For a good discussion of the history of policing and public lighting, see Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. “The Policing of Street Lighting.” Yale French Studies, no. 73, 1987, pp. 61–74. For the moral as well as the legal dimension of this history, see for example Ekirch, A. Roger. At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. Norton, 2005, pp. 329–35. On panopticism, see Foucault, Michel. “The Eye of Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Translated by Colin Gordon et al., Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 146–65; a critical discussion of the limitations of the idea of panopticism can be found in Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 3–5. ↑

46. See Schivelbusch, ibid. ↑

47. See Schivelbusch, ibid.; also Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Angela Davies, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 97–114. ↑

48. From “Worship.” Essays and English Traits, Volume V. P.F. Collier & Son, 1909, p. 286. Qtd. in Ekirch, op. cit. 334. See also Leahy, Richard. Literary Illumination: The Evolution of Artificial Light in Nineteenth-Century Literature. University of Wales Press, 2018, pp. 94–100 and 103–07; and Brox, Jane. Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light. Houghton Mifflin, 2010, pp. 75–6. ↑

49. Sala, George Augustus Sala. Gaslight and Daylight, with Some London Scenes They Shine Upon. Chatto and Windus, 1878, p. 159. Qtd. in Leahy, op. cit. 104–06. ↑

50. Cf. Melbin, Murray. “Night As Frontier.” American Sociological Review, vol. 43, no. 1, 1978, pp. 3–22; also Foucault, op. cit. 152–54. ↑

51. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Volume III. New York Graphic Society, 1959, p. 75. ↑

52. Guillemin, Amédée. Le ciel: Notions d’astronomie à l’usage des gens du monde et de la jeunesse. Librairie de L. Hachette et C., 1864, p. 383 (my translation): “Quand l’atmosphère est éclairée par la Lune ou par la lueur crépusculaire, ou, comme il arrive dans les grands centres de population, par l’illumination des maisons et des rues, les dernières grandeurs s’effacent et le nombre des étoiles visibles est beaucoup plus limité.” ↑

53. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 564. See also Bachelard, Gaston. The Flame of a Candle. Translated by Joni Caldwell, The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988, p. 64. ↑

54. Falchi, Fabio et al. “The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness.” Science Advances, vol. 2, no. 6. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2016. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600377 ↑

55. Kyba, Christopher C.M. et al., “Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars from 2011 to 2022.” Science vol. 379, no. 6629. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2023, pp. 265–68. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7781 ↑

56. Sallis, John. “Elementality and the Politics of Light.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 46, no. 2, Edinburgh University Press, 2024, p. 140. ↑

57. Cf. Bachelard, Gaston. ibid. Also “Reverie and Cosmos.” The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Translated by Daniel Russell, Beacon Press, 1960, pp. 171–212. ↑

58. Sala, ibid. ↑

59. Op. cit. 139. Sallis is specifically discussing satellites in low Earth orbit rather than light pollution of terrestrial origin, though his argument is certainly applicable to both phenomena. ↑