The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

For any noctambule, Paris held plenty of challenges. The narrow streets had no sidewalks, and death by stagecoach was not an infrequent event. “There are nights when all the disadvantages of a crowded quarter are apparent at the same time,” Bretonne wrote. “As I was coming off rue du Foarre, a large marrow bone fell at my feet. Its sharp force and the force with which it was hurled would have made a lethal weapon of it, had it struck me.” As his walk continued, he faced a “sheet of soapy water” thrown from a window, then a bucket of ashes. Still, things could have been worse. The city’s dirt and pebble streets were lined with sewage and waste, the air filled with a rank stench that we could only imagine by standing in a town dump. Writes historian Roger Ekirch, “The Duchess of Orleans expressed amazement in 1720 that Paris did not have ‘entire rivers of piss’ from the men who urinated in streets already littered with dung from horses and livestock. Ditches, a foot or more deep, grew clogged with ashes, oyster shells, and animal carcasses,” and “most notorious were the showers of urine and excrement that bombarded streets at night from open windows and doors.” William Hogarth’s painting of London in Night, from The Four Times of the Day (1736), might just as well have been a city street scene from Paris: A woman pours a bucket of human waste out an open window onto the back of an unfortunate man who staggers along with his wife. He holds a stick and she a lantern and sword. Oh, and a bonfire burns in the middle of the narrow street behind them.

Amid this dimly lit craziness it might be difficult to believe that street lighting could be a source of bitterness and anger. But in the years before the French Revolution, street lighting was often a thorn in the public’s side. From its start, public street lighting had been significantly motivated by the state’s desire to gain control over the streets at night, and for many Parisians the oil lamp simply stood for tyranny. When lanterns were at first hung low, they made for easy targets, destroyed with walking sticks. But when the lanterns were then hung out of reach, a new technique emerged, that of cutting the lantern’s ropes and letting the lantern smash into the street. At times, like the modern-day smashing of Halloween pumpkins, smashing lanterns was simply a form of entertainment. As Schivelbusch writes, “Whatever the details and methods, smashing lanterns was obviously an extremely enjoyable activity.”

While the candle lanterns and réverbères are long gone, and electric lighting makes Paris today as bright overall as any city its size, the echoes of such history remain. Though some complain that old Paris has become a museum or even that it’s dead, I think it anything but, and I think that especially at night. What’s kept alive is the opportunity to add your story to those countless stories before, even to add to your own story if you have been here in the past. Because so much of the old city has been preserved, you can come back to Paris and the night you walked years ago will still be here.

The year after high school, while backpacking nine months through Europe, I remember especially a week in Paris, in the winter, alone. I had lucked out and discovered a small hotel on the Île de la Cité, the Henry IV on the Place Dauphine. I would set out each night and walk for hours through old Paris, the gray-black Seine there to guide the way, the long, gray ministry buildings with rooftops black and windows dark, the French tricolor spotlit in front. I would stand on the Pont Neuf and wonder where this life would lead.

As Downie and I continue our stroll, I tell him that the night I reached the city this year, I took the métro from the Gare du Nord to the Champs-Élysées, near the Arc de Triomphe. A wet snowfall weighed on tree branches and café awnings, crystals sparkling. The snow snarled rush-hour traffic and slowed walkers with its slushy challenge, casting a hush over the sounds of wet tires and boots. The leafless smooth-barked plane trees along the avenue were filled with small white lights, bright with a tinge of sky blue, each with two or three long bulbs like fluorescent ceiling lamps dark except for a periodic slide of light down their length, the movement like one of melting snow sliding down a rock face or roof. At the end of the wide Champs-Élysées boulevard, I wandered past the bright blue-white Ferris wheel (La Grande Roue) set up for the season in the enormous Place de la Concorde, the famous city square where King Louis XVI lost his head to the guillotine and where the spotlit Obelisk—a 3,300-year-old Egyptian column—stands seventy-five feet tall. From the Place I skirted around the locked and deserted Tuileries gardens, which, during the day, fills with couples and families and solo strollers, and found myself among the stone buildings of the Louvre Palace, where black lampposts ring the courtyard with bright light. Then, along the Seine to the Île de la Cité, past the large Christmas tree filled with navy-blue lights in front of Notre-Dame, around the cathedral onto Île St.-Louis, and through the amber-lit Marais neighborhood to my hotel. All told, a walk of nearly two hours, but in that time I saw much of the old city. No museums or galleries or music or events, not even a glass of vin rouge or a quick stop at a créperie. But the City of Light on a dark winter’s eve and nearly for free, the priceless sensation of having returned to something once mine.

“Everything belongs to me in the night,” wrote Bretonne. In Paris more than two hundred years later, that truth remains: Everything is accessible, at least to your eyes—monuments, famous buildings, ancient streets. Little is closed off as you walk this city at night. Even—as the lights come on in apartments you pass—other people’s lives.

Downie nods. “My wife says it reminds her of an Advent calendar, the way the windows suddenly come to life.” We’ve reached the Place des Vosges, built in the early 1600s, the oldest planned square in the city, lined with grand two-story apartments. “That’s a seventeenth-century painted ceiling,” he says, pointing. “This city is full of unbelievable interiors, and you only see them at night.”

In a neighboring apartment are long maroon drapes pulled back from French doors, the lifted slant top of a grand piano, and in the corner on the wall a stag’s head. “Now, speaking of expensive,” Downie says, “this is a double pavilion owned by one man, one very rich family. They’ve owned it for a hundred seventy years. And if you look, see that tapestry? It’s a sixteenth-century tapestry. If other lights were on, you would see amazing things because he’s one of the most successful auctioneers in the country.”

These are rooms into which, during the day, I would never be allowed. But at night, walking Paris, invited into room after room, life after life, I feel welcomed to enjoy the beauty this city offers. And I want to know more.

François Jousse emerges into the Parisian evening as though from out of the shadows, ambling toward me from behind the enormous Christmas tree in front of Notre-Dame. With his bushy beard, red plaid coat, and camel-colored hiking boots, he looks like a lumberjack. It turns out that those boots are key—Jousse likes to walk Paris, day and night, and that’s what we have agreed to do: a tour of central Paris so he can tell me about his work. He is immediately jovial, friendly and cheerful, clearly delighted to be talking about lighting the city he loves, albeit slowly in English with a heavy French accent. He begins many of his sentences with “Alors …,” meaning “So …,” before explaining something new. There is much to explain, because there has been so much thought put into the lighting of Paris. And the man who has done much of that thinking, the man who has done so much to create the atmosphere of Paris at night, is François Jousse.

We start at Notre-Dame, where in 2002 Jousse oversaw the completion of a ten-year, multi-million-dollar upgrade to the cathedral’s exterior lighting. For several decades after World War II the cathedral was simply spotlit, and then only its façade. Before the war, it had spent centuries in darkness—a Brassaï photograph from the early 1930s, shot from Île St.-Louis, shows the cathedral from behind, lit only by surrounding streetlights, a dark hulking shape as though carved from coal. Not until recently—not until Jousse—did the city take seriously a relighting of one of its most enduring landmarks. “For the lighting of the cathedral we made a competition, a jury with clergy, cultural minister, city of Paris—many people,” he says with a slight grin, “and it was very, very difficult.” Jousse tells me one idea was to have the cathedral’s famous stained-glass rose window lit from within, a proposal of which the clergy disapproved. “They said,” Jousee laughs, “we were the devil.”

For Jousse, the project of lighting the famous cathedral didn’t stop with just the church. When he says “the cathedral,” he explains, he means not only its face but everything around the building, the lights of the bridge adjacent to it, the plaza in front of the cathedral. “The concept was to put the cathedral in the center of the island. And to tell a story.” For example, Jousse points out how the lighting grows gradually brighter as it reaches the cathedral’s top, intentionally drawing the viewer’s gaze skyward—toward heaven. And though pleased with the project, Jousse says he didn’t get everything he wanted. “I have made also a design for this garden,” he explains as we pass the dark courtyard behind the cathedral, “but no money.” He then offers a “what-can-you-do” laugh, lowers his gaze, and we’re off again, walking to the next stop, stretches of silence but for the crunch and splash of our boots in the snow-crust and melt-slop of the Paris sidewalks.

Speaking of money, the city now spends some 150,000 euros each night for the electricity, maintenance, and renovation of its lighting, a quantifiable reflection of its commitment. But this wasn’t always the case. When Jousse took his position in 1981, Paris at night looked little like it does now. As with Notre-Dame, the city’s famous monuments and buildings were mostly spotlit, and many others were not lit at all. Over the course of thirty years, Jousse and his associates relit Paris almost entirely—more than three hundred buildings, thirty-six bridges, the streets and boulevards—all with the goal of integrating them into the city, being as economical as possible, and creating beauty. Before his retirement in 2011 as chief engineer for doctrine, expertise, and technical control, Jousse was the man in charge. His car even held a special permit that allowed him to park wherever he wanted in order to better troubleshoot, direct, or otherwise consider how Paris would be lit.

Most visitors to Paris probably notice the beauty of the lighting, but they probably don’t notice how carefully that beauty is created—where and how the floodlights are placed, the challenges the lighting designers faced, the amount of energy used. That’s just fine for Jousse. In fact, he delights in showing me how he hid many of the projectors so that the lights become part of the building, and the building part of the city. He doesn’t want to draw attention to the lighting, nor does he want the lighted building to stand out from the neighborhood. On the sidewalk across the Seine from Notre-Dame, at the end of a long row of green metal stalls—those of the famous bouquinistes, the booksellers whose presence here began in the 1600s—Jousse shows me how the first two stalls actually house no books, hiding two spotlights instead. Anyone walking past the bookstalls would never guess the light on the cathedral came from within them.

“Whose idea was this?” I ask.

“This was mine.” He laughs.

Jousse sees himself as a historian of technique, and a storyteller using light as his language. As we walk past the Hôtel de Ville he says, “Now I show to you my last design in Paris.” He leads me toward the Tour St.-Jacques, the 170-foot Gothic tower that is all that remains of the wonderfully named sixteenth-century Church of St.-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie (St. James of the Butchery). Jousse used the story of Blaise Pascal’s experiments with atmospheric pressure as inspiration to develop this lighting design. “I want to make homage to Pascal. The light falls from the top, and when it reaches the ground it makes a splash.” And indeed, the light starts brighter at the top, fades as it falls, then brightens and spreads at the tower’s base. This blend of artistic thinking with technical solutions essentially describes Jousse’s work in Paris—to think about the philosophy behind the light, and then to make it happen. “I want that the building says something with the light,” he explains. “But the speaking can be different. Maybe it’s an architectural speech, maybe it’s a historical speech, maybe it’s humorous. Sometimes the speech can be spiritual. Sometimes people say to me, But nobody will understand what the building says. And I say, It’s not a problem, the building says something and it’s beautiful because the building says something.”

At St.-Eustache I see what he means. From a block away the cathedral seems to rise from darkness, its bottom half left unlighted, its top half glowing subtle amber-gold. Jousse smiles. “For the church I want to be sure the light says something. I give the speaking to one designer, and the technique to another. And the first one must say, ‘I see the church like that during the night because na, na, na, na,’” he laughs. “It was the first realization with this way of thinking, maybe in the world. And his speech was something like, the church is like a battery of God-energy. During the day the church takes in the energy of God, at night the energy of God comes from inside to go outside.”

As we walk closer to the church the bottom half emerges from the shadows, its stone arches lit by ambient rather than direct light. “When you’re far away you ask why isn’t it lit, but when you’re up close you don’t ask anymore,” he says, clearly satisfied. “There’s comfort, and there’s ambience. Everything doesn’t necessarily have to be lit. On the contrary, it’s when you leave things in shadows that you see the light better.”

I wonder if the same could be said about light and quiet.

The sounds of city traffic fall away as we walk into the Louvre courtyard called the Cour Carrée, a small square with a circular fountain in the middle, and on the three stories of sandstone and windows the golden light of some 110,000 small (4.5-watt) lamps (“the same number as all the other lamps in Paris,” Jousse explains). “It’s very beautiful,” he says, this time more serious. “C’est magique.” The effect created is that rather than the lights shining on the building, the building seems to be emitting the light. “The picture is fantastic. The maintenance is also fantastic.” He laughs. The energy for this one courtyard alone costs one million euros per year.

We leave and cross the busy street to a bridge, Le Pont des Arts. “Et voilà,” Jousse says. “Another magic area of Paris.” Yes, this one a romantic pedestrian overpass made of iron and wood. Jousse says the challenge here was that on this slim bridge there were no good places to put light projectors. “It’s a very poetic place,” he says, “and if people have projectors in their eyes it’s not good. But the city says to me, ‘All bridges must be illuminated.’ So, I say okay.” He chuckles. Jousse solved the problem by placing his projectors under the bridge facing the river, and illuminated the bridge from the light reflecting off the moving water, thus creating a shimmering, beautiful effect.

What does it mean, I ask, to include values of beauty and poetry and love when you’re working with light? “It’s hard for me to answer,” he says, “I’m an engineer, not a poet. But as far as love goes, I would say that’s true. Oui, c’est vrai. I’m in love with Paris.” He laughs. “If you work on lighting without having any love for what you’re lighting …,” he trails off, as though there’s nothing more to be said. Then: “The love of Paris comes first, the lighting of Paris is secondary.”

For our last stop we take the métro up to Montmartre and look down onto the city, the softly lit white curves of the Sacré-Cœur church behind us (another of his lighting designs? Oui). The Eiffel Tower stands over the dark city, lit from within by three hundred fifty sodium vapor lights designed to mimic the amber glow of the gas lamps that once lined the interior of the structure. Only three decades ago, just one side of the tower was lit, all the lighting from spotlights stationed by the Trocadéro Palace. Jousse tells me that the energy consumption was huge, and because of the tower’s brown paint you couldn’t see any details. Then came the idea to light the tower from within. Since then, except for each top of the hour, when twenty thousand white lights sparkle the tower for ten minutes, or on rare occasions (briefly all in red for a visit from the Chinese premier, all in blue to honor the European Union), the lighting hasn’t changed for twenty-five years. “And for us it’s very conservative, it’s classical. It’s beautiful like a jewel, but it doesn’t change. But it could be worse; it could be a wedding cake. So, sometimes classical is good.”

When I share my appreciation for the role lighting plays in the story Paris tells, he says, “If you feel that way, then I am very happy.” With this, Jousse bids me farewell.

I turn and look out over Paris. From Montmartre, you see the pollution from the suburbs at the edges of the city, their butterscotch orange lights running unleashed into the sky. But the old Paris looks dark, the view a direct result of the rules that light fixtures be directed downward and the lights themselves not be placed any higher than they are. The effect is that of an old city in pre-industrial darkness, though under that canopy you know there lives and breathes a city of light.

When I turn back toward Sacré-Cœur, François Jousse is rounding a corner of the church, his head lowered, his boots returning him to the shadows.

7 (#ulink_0e40e266-7a50-583f-ba34-38e8e24ec4b7)

Light That Blinds, Fear That Enlightens (#ulink_0e40e266-7a50-583f-ba34-38e8e24ec4b7)

After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.

—ANNIE DILLARD (1974)

Rolling hills, gnarly old trees, a creek running through—when I return at Christmas to the suburban Minneapolis neighborhood where I grew up I wait until just before midnight, then head with my dog Luna two blocks south, slip through a tear in the chain link fence, and take a golf course walk. On account of liability fears we’re not supposed to be here. But we are, and it’s a pleasure, walking in what passes for dark. The city-lit sky and snow-swamped land combine—darker than day, but lighter than night ought to be. The leafless limbs of oaks and maples and the nests of birds and squirrels high in the branches, against the glowing winter sky, are like x-ray images of various animals, of vascular systems and hearts. Some years, solitary owls perch in silhouetted trees, watching me until I notice, then swooping away. Other years, deer crossing a fairway in the distance, or the circular squeal-yipping-bark of coyotes by the railroad tracks. And once, looking back, the weightless drifting prance of a fox crossing the snowy sloping hillside we’d just tread.

To the east the city rises in golds trimmed in royal blues and sparkling reds, silvers, and whites, steam twisting street-level to sky. Sky glow colors the entire eastern horizon hazy orange—and with the south, west, and northern horizons all gray-white, any low-hanging star has been wiped away. Only overhead are maybe four dozen, no more—Orion; the Pleiades; Sirius, the Dog Star. It seems like night here but it’s not, at least not as it would be without all this light.

Slipping back through the fence, walking home, we are bathed by corner streetlights and the 100-watt bulbs in “brass and glass” front-door fixtures. The combination of house lights and streetlights and city-supplied sky glow illuminates the four blocks to the street’s end, each house defined. It’s a scene repeated in every direction and, with rare exception, over the suburb as a whole. It’s the kind of suburb in which tens of millions of Americans have grown up learning what “dark” is, the kind of suburb in which one hundred million Americans live. You would never see the Milky Way here, or meteors, or anything close to Van Gogh’s wild night, and on Bortle’s scale, on its darkest nights, this suburb would be lucky to rank a 7. And still, a few years ago, the people on this street asked for more light.

In the forty years my parents have lived here, there has never been any trouble with crime. That is, the type of crime we fear—the stranger snooping outside the window, sneaking in the back door, doing us harm. Even so, the neighborhood petitioned the city government, and soon five straight metallic poles topped by yellow carriage fixtures had been stitched into the street at fifty-yard intervals. From one night to the next, gone was what had been left of the street my mother had chosen because it reminded her of the dark country roads in Ohio where she’d grown up in the 1950s. “I was against it,” she says of more streetlights, “but I was outvoted.”

Why? I ask.

“Oh,” my father says. “Safety and security.”

Sooner or later, when talking about artificial lights and darkness, you come to questions of safety and security. Usually, it’s sooner. In fact, the first question at any presentation about light pollution is bound to be something like, “Yes, so it’s great to see the night sky and everything, but we need lights for safety.” This isn’t actually a question, I realize, and usually the speaker isn’t really asking but rather stating what we have all been taught is fact. But often that statement has a subtext, too, something like what I found on a Colorado website: “less street lighting means more rapes, more assaults, more robberies, and more murders. It is wonderful to be able to see the details of the Crab Nebula from your back yard. It is also wonderful to be able to walk down the street without being attacked by a violent predator.”

You don’t have to look far to find the idea that darkness and danger go together, as do security and light. In Oakland, a city with thirty-seven thousand streetlights, an assistant police chief claims increased lighting levels could help reduce crime because “most of these crooks, when they commit a crime, want to do it in darkness.” In Boston, with sixty-seven thousand streetlights of its own, a Northeastern University criminology professor argues that lights act as “natural surveillance” and can reduce crime by 20 percent. In Los Angeles, home to more than two hundred forty thousand streetlights, the city attributes a 17 percent drop in violent gang-related crimes in the areas surrounding parks to those parks’ having received new lights. And here in Minneapolis the police advise, “Protect your family, property, and neighborhood by turning on your front door and yard lights,” and “Remember: Criminals like the dark, so make sure your yard has lots of light!”

Clearly, plenty of us have been receiving similar advice—we live in a world that is brighter than ever before, and growing brighter every year. Part of that growth comes from an ever-increasing human population, especially in urban areas. But the amount of light we are using per person is growing as well. In the UK, for example, lighting efficiency has doubled over the past fifty years—but the per capita electricity consumption for lighting increased fourfold over that time. We are choosing to light up more things, and we are lighting those things more brightly.

There’s no doubt light at night can make us safer, from a lighthouse beam guiding ships from rocky coasts to simply enough sidewalk light to keep us from tripping on cracked cement. But increasing numbers of lighting engineers and lighting designers, astronomers and dark sky activists, physicians and lawyers and police now say that often the amount of light we’re using—and how we’re using it—goes far beyond true requirements for safety, and that when it comes to lighting, darkness, and security we tend to assume as common sense ideas that, in truth, are not so black and white.

Foremost among these assumptions is that because some light improves our safety, more light will improve our safety more. It’s an assumption I will hear challenged again and again. As one lighting professional explained, “Too much light would have a negative effect, because if you look into a light, you can’t see anything, you can’t see beyond it.” Gazing from behind his desk, he paused, “You know, a bright enough light in between us and we can’t see each other—and we’re sitting across from each other!”

The sky over Concord, Massachusetts, this famous town of sixteen thousand about twenty miles west of Boston, reminds me of the sky above my parents’ house near Minneapolis—washed out. (Alan Lewis, whom I have come here to meet, calls it “the great yellow sky.”) Of course, this wasn’t always so. In 1836, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the stars here:

Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

This is almost like reading ancient history—stars, seen from the streets of cities? In this passage from Nature, Emerson looked for a way to make the point that we take nature for granted—we take life for granted—by finding an example of something so commonplace we don’t even see it anymore. What better example than the brilliant starry night over a nineteenth-century Concord lit by oil lamps?

I didn’t have to visit Concord to know that its sky holds many fewer of Emerson’s “envoys of beauty.” But I wanted to talk with Lewis, to learn more about how too much light could actually act in a negative way. A longtime optometrist and former president of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA), the lighting professionals who have much to say about how we light our world, Alan Lewis has spent the last forty years helping to “educate lighting people about how the visual system operates.”

For example, Lewis says, most streetlights are actually designed in a way that often causes more problems than they solve.

“Badly designed street lighting, which is probably eighty percent of street lighting, are glare sources,” he explains. “That is, they actually reduce the contrast of things you’re trying to see rather than increase it, because of this disability glare problem that occurs due to scatter in the eye.”

Disability glare from poorly designed streetlights—picture the traditional cobrahead drop-lens fixtures used on most American streets—is the main reason drivers, especially older drivers, have a tough time at night. As we age, proteins in the lens of our eye begin to accumulate, and we lose the transparency we had when we were younger. In the same way that a brand-new windshield is crystal clear but ages over time with accumulated minuscule chips and dings, these proteins reduce the eye’s transparency as they scatter the light coming into the eye. The effect is that instead of going to the retina and focusing, the light is distributed across the retina, casting what Lewis calls “a veiling luminance” that significantly reduces contrast.

To optimize vision, Lewis says, the key is to maximize the contrast—the brightness difference between what you’re trying to see and the background—while minimizing the amount of light going directly from the light source into the eye, because when light goes directly into the eye the greater portion of it is scattered. “You don’t want bright lights coming in from anywhere but the target you’re trying to see,” he says. “I mean any additional source of light out there, like a streetlight shining in your eye or a headlight coming at you or glare sources on a building just makes things harder to see.”