The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  For a fascinating exploration of Van Gogh’s night paintings, see “The Skies of Vincent van Gogh,” by Charles A. Whitney (Art History 9, no. 5, September 1986). By figuring out how the night sky would have appeared over Arles, France, in 1888 and consulting weather records, Whitney was able to determine the sky Van Gogh would have seen during the time he painted his famous works. Whitney then concludes that, of Van Gogh’s three most famous paintings of the night sky (Starry Night, Café Terrace at Night, and Starry Night on the Rhone), the Big Dipper in the latter is the only clearly identifiable constellation, and even this has been transposed by the Dutch artist from the northern sky to the southeastern sky. Of the famous Starry Night, Whitney argues that the painting was done in Van Gogh’s cell from memory, and that “he assembled his own sky from impressions gathered over an interval of a month or so.” For anyone who appreciates Van Gogh’s work, and especially his night paintings, a trip to Arles is rewarding. The famous café has kept its brilliant yellow paint, the exact point where Van Gogh painted Starry Night on the Rhone under gas lamps is marked (ironically, glaring white lights now clot the scene), and while the asylum in St.-Rémy where he painted Starry Night can only be visited during the day, his room has been reconstructed and preserved, and anyone familiar with the painting will instantly recognize the sloping hills in the distance.

  Giacomo Balla was so taken with electric light that, in addition to painting his radiant Street Light, he named two of his three daughters Luce and Elettricità: light and electricity. He named his third daughter Elica, which translates to English as “propeller.”

  Joachim Pissarro, the great-grandson of the famous French painter, was curator at MoMA for the 2009 exhibition Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. In the book that accompanied the exhibition, Pissarro argues, in “The Formation of Crepuscular and Nocturnal Themes in Van Gogh’s Early Writings,” that Van Gogh had a lifelong love of the night that originated long before he began painting. For more on painting darkness and night, also see Frederic Remington: The Color of Night (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003), by Nancy K. Anderson.

  8: Tales from Two Cities

  The epigraph from François Jousse comes from Elaine Sciolino’s “As the Sun Sets, A Parisian’s Masterpiece Comes to Life” (New York Times, December 23, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/world/europe/23jousse.html?pagewanted=all). An accompanying slideshow shows Jousse in action. See also the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s “Foreign Correspondent” feature on Jousse (http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/oldcontent/s2464785.htm). The video opens with a short interview with the reigning “Miss Paris,” asking if she knows the city’s lighting design is mostly the result of a man named François Jousse. She doesn’t. By the end of the video, she is saying, “Merci, François Jousse.” When I asked Jousse, he laughed and told me that he never met Miss Paris and hadn’t known anything about her participation in the video until he saw the finished product.

  London overtook Beijing, China, in 1825 with a population of 1,335,000 and held the title of most populous city for a century, when, despite a population well over 7 million, it was passed by New York. Today, the title is generally agreed to be held by Tokyo, Japan, with a population of—depending on how you count—between 13 million and 33 million.

  The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, famous for Treasure Island (1883) and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886), published “A Plea for Gas Lamps” in 1881’s Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers. See also his poem “The Lamplighter,” which describes a child’s desire to “go round at night and light the lamps with you!” It seems apparent that Stevenson was not a big fan of the intensely bright arc lights, those he called “a lamp for a nightmare.” He wrote, “Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror.” These same lights were soon shining in cities across western Europe and North America.

  Charles Dickens’s essay “Night Walks,” published in 1861, can be found online and in several anthologies, the best of which might be Night Walks: A Bedside Companion, compiled by Joyce Carol Oates (Princeton, NJ: The Ontario Review Press, 1982). In her introduction, Oates writes, “There is a nocturnal personality, a nocturnal spirit, distinct from that of daylight and available only in solitude,” which certainly characterizes Dickens’s fascination with walking through London in the middle of a winter’s night.

  The book by Sukhdev Sandhu—Night Haunts: A Journey through the London Night (London: Verso, 2007)—emerged from a web-based collaboration between writer Sandhu, website designer Ian Budden, and sound artist Scanner. The project can be found online at http://www.nighthaunts.org.uk/. Starting with the deceptively simple question “Whatever happened to the London night?,” Sandhu spends time not only with the bargers on the Thames but many other Londoners working the night shift: police in helicopters, sewer cleaners, mini-cab drivers, graffiti writers, and an urban fox hunter. “I’m keen to reactivate the largely-dormant Victorian and early-twentieth-century genre of the midnight traipse across the metropolis,” he writes, but also “to provide… its present-day reality.”

  Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) can be found online at http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/strtwoolfessay.htm.

  For more on London at night before the advent of electric lighting, see Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (New York: Anchor, 2003), especially the chapters “Let There Be Light” and “Night in the City.” As Ackroyd writes, “It is the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, which lends the night images of London their peculiar intensity and power.… It is an echoic city, filled with shadows, and what better time to manifest itself than at night?”

  Originally from San Francisco, David Downie has called Paris home since 1986. His Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light (New York: Broadway Books, 1990; reprint, 2011) features thirty essays on the “places, people, and phenomena” of the French capital and evocative photographs by Downie’s wife, Alison Harris. Together, the two have published several books on France and Italy, with a special attention to food. Because of a degenerative eye disease that makes him highly sensitive to light, Downie is especially a fan of Paris after dark. Though, he told me, he’s concerned for the future. “If it gets any brighter,” he said, “they’re going to have to start calling it the ‘city of blinding light.’ ”

  Joachim Schlör’s Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998) provides an entertaining “history of the nocturnal city,” documenting how over less than a century artificial light radically changed life in Europe’s major cities. While detailing the danger of the city at night, Schlör always has “the forgotten beauty of the dark” close at hand, especially as it relates to walking. “The nocturnal walk through the city can appeal to memory; it can revive feelings once thought lost, which find no expression in the day; it can awaken a new sense of beauty.”

  Les Nuits de Paris, or, The Nocturnal Spectator (New York: Random House, 1964) chronicles Bretonne’s nighttime adventures in 100 short episodes representing 100 nights of walking through Paris. His conceit is that he had promised a wealthy madame living in the Marais neighborhood he would walk through the city and report back to her. And so we get Bretonne interacting with people on the street—hoodlums, hookers, bakers—but, rather than do as a modern writer might and simply observe, Bretonne is all about interacting with his fellow Parisians, often trying to settle disagreements, rescue young ladies, or slip into and out of parties unnoticed. In her history of walking, Rebecca Solnit claims Bretonne wrote of Paris “in the way many others would later: as a book, a wilderness, and a sort of erogenous zone, or bedroom.” The result is entertaining and revealing, perhaps nowhere more than in his account of the violence during the 1789 revolution (“his belly was slashed open, and his head cut off”), which he witnessed firsthand and only narrowly escaped—or so he claims.


  Before the more efficient guillotine arrived, the preferred method of execution during the French Revolution was to hang the accused from the nearest lamppost, a common enough event that the verb “lanterner” changed its meaning from “to do nothing” or “to waste one’s time” to “to hang someone from the lantern,” and the emblematic song of the revolution, “Ah! ça ira,” evolved to include the practice:

  Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira

  Les aristocrates à la lanterne!

  Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira

  Les aristocrates on les pendra!

  Ah! It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine

  Aristocrats to the lamppost!

  Ah! It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine

  Aristocrats, we’ll hang them!

  In the most famous instance, on July 22 of 1789, two hated members of the ancien régime, Foulon and Berthier, were hanged in the Place de Grève near the Hôtel de Ville. Bretonne offers a detailed description of the scene, including seeing the blood-soaked corpse of Berthier, and his admission that “I have since heard that the chest was open, and that the heart had been ripped out.” Today, while the old lanterns are long gone, a plaque above the street corner marks the spot.

  For a fictional—though thoroughly researched—account of Paris in the mid-eighteenth century, see Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: the Story of a Murderer (New York: Knopf, 1986). Suskind gives his main character, Grenouille, an almost supernatural sense of smell and layers his story with details of a time when “there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women”; “the stench was foulest in Paris.” Grenouille “worked as long as there was light—eight hours in winter, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours in summer,” and “had soon so thoroughly smelled out the quarter between St.-Eustache and the Hôtel de Ville that he could find his way around in it by pitch-dark night.”

  For an excellent account of how artificial light in the streets of seventeenth-century Europe radically changed city life—and other fascinating details, including the way dinnertime shifted several hours later—see Craig Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). This wave of new light washed over northern Europe quickly, says Koslofsky, reporting that “in 1660, no European city had permanently illuminated its streets, but by 1700 consistent and reliable street lighting had been established in Amsterdam, Paris, Turin, London, and Copenhagen, and across the Holy Roman Empire from Hamburg to Vienna.”

  E. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: Norton, 2005) offers readers an entertaining history of pre-industrial night in western Europe and eastern North America. With exhaustive research and an often bemused tone, Ekirch presents page after page of eye-opening facts and stories about the Western world before the electric light. The book is perhaps best known for Ekirch’s discovery of the segmented sleep patterns followed by pre-industrial peoples, but his discussion of “the way of life people fashioned after dark in the face of both real and supernatural perils” covers everything from the catastrophic danger of fire to the humor of mistaken identities in the darkened bedroom.

  During the 1830 revolution, lantern smashing became a street-fighting tactic used against government forces, and it later found its way into Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables (1862), where the practice turned the city’s center into “a huge patch of darkness… a black gulf.” In a short chapter titled “The Street Urchin an Enemy of Light,” the hero, Valjean, encounters a street urchin bent on destroying every lantern he can find. After “the lamp-lighter came as usual to light the lantern,” Valjean sees “by the light of the lanterns” the boy’s face. As the two are talking, the boy picks up a stone and destroys the lantern with a well-placed shot, shouting, “That’s right, old street, put on your night-cap.” When Valjean offers the boy a coin for food, the boy rejects it, saying, “Bourgeois, I prefer to smash lanterns.” When the boy finally flutters away “like an escaped bird,” plunging “back into the gloom as though he made a hole it,” Valjean wonders if the whole encounter had really taken place. But then, in the distance, “a startling shiver of glass” and “the magnificent crash of a lantern rattling down on the pavement.”

  The photographs of Paris at night in the 1930s by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï are breathtaking in their depiction of the city’s new electric streetlights pushing back against the eternal weight of old night. Of Brassaï’s 1933 masterpiece Paris by Night (New York: Pantheon, reprint, 1987), originally published in English as Paris After Dark, Joachim Schlör writes, “the book expressed a certain feeling of the times, that something was coming to an end: a long history of the Parisian night.” In the book, Brassaï’s photographs are accompanied by the words of Paul Morand (“Moving on, I hear the grisly sound of pigs being sawn in two”), whose brief introduction argues, “night is not the negative of day… as on the photographic plate… another picture altogether emerges at nightfall.”

  In addition to rejecting the idea of having Notre Dame’s rose window lit from within, the cathedral priests also denied an idea from lighting designer Roger Narboni to have a wave of light pulse the length of the cathedral at the top of each hour like the tone of a bell. As Narboni told me, “From the beginning I wanted to have a wave of light, piloted by computer, that every hour would start from the back and move slowly through to the main façade. I called it the luminous bell of the cathedral, because there are big, big bells in the towers but they don’t ring them anymore on the hour. It would last for two, three, or four minutes and that’s it. But again, the church didn’t want that. They said we don’t want any dynamic light on the cathedral; this is a cathedral, it’s not a disco. And I said this has nothing to do with a disco, it’s very slow. But they never understood the poetry of it. So, in the end everyone said forget about your wave, forget about your bell.”

  For more on Gustave Eiffel’s famous tower see Jill Jonnes’s Eiffel’s Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris’s Beloved Monument and the Extraordinary World’s Fair That Introduced It (New York: Penguin, 2009). Jonnes shares the bewildering fact that the tower was only built for the Paris Fair of 1889 with the understanding that it would be torn down soon after (it was saved only through Eiffel’s ingenuity in rallying support for his creation). She also explains the challenges Eiffel faced in building the iconic tower (such as engineering all four legs to reach the first platform exactly) and tells of what are to our ears today the ridiculous attacks against the tower (that it could not stand the power of the wind, that it would “become a dangerous magnet, drawing the nails from surrounding Parisian buildings”). In an era when the tower has become all but synonymous with Paris, the story of its creation and survival is a fascinating and enjoyable read.

  7: Light That Blinds, Fear That Enlightens

  The quote from Annie Dillard can be found in “Seeing,” from her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), which won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

  The “darkness” I experienced on the suburban golf course is explained by the finding that clouds amplify city lights by ten times. See the article by Christopher Kyba and others titled “Cloud Coverage Acts as an Amplifier for Ecological Light Pollution in Urban Ecosystems,” part of the Verlust der Nacht (Loss of the Night), a federally funded study in Germany (www.verlustdernacht.de).

  Liability fears are one of the key reasons we use so much light in American society, especially when it comes to places such as parking lots and college campuses. No one wants to be sued for a crime or accident that occurred where there wasn’t “enough” light. Yet in reality the established law when it comes to this subject is virtually nonexistent. At the very least, as one lawyer told me, “There is no law requiring landowners to illuminate their property excessively, and there is no law requiring landowners to illuminate the heavens.”

  The quote about our choice being either a view of a good night sky (�
��less street lighting”) or fearing for our lives (“attacked by a violent predator”) comes from a 2006 position paper titled “Dark Sky Ordinances: How to Separate the Light from the Darkness,” by David B. Kopel and Michael Loatman (http://www.scribd.com/doc/29812975/Dark-Sky-Ordinances-How-to-Separate-the-Light-from-the-Darkness) of the Independence Institute, a conservative think tank based in Colorado. The paper uses assertions both unfortunate (“dark sky ordinances mainly benefit casual urban stargazers”) and overstated to the point of being false (“research shows that improved street lighting reduces crime by 20 percent”) to rail against attempts to control overuse of light. The claim that “the overall reduction in crime after improved lighting was 20%” comes from a 2002 report titled “Improved Street Lighting and Crime Prevention,” by David Farrington and Brandon Welsh.