EAST MONTPELIER – As I write, it’s only a quarter past four in the afternoon, but I wouldn’t want to be walking in the woods right now without a light. Down at the foot of the driveway, the headlights of homebound traffic zoom past, and a soft snow sifts down over the whole scene. Snug in our house, Kiki and I sit quietly in the office, I at the desk and she just behind me in the easy chair. Now and then she jumps up into my lap between me and the desk to help me type. In three quarters of an hour it’ll be time for our preprandial snack of chips, dip, and (in my case) orange juice and seltzer. There are only two lights on, my desk lamp and Sunshine, the night light out in the hall.
It’s the darkest week of the year, but it’s hardly noticed by folks who spend the majority of their time indoors, in offices, in closed cars or at home. We notice the darkness much less than we might because of the magic of electricity and the emergency backup power of generators. We also have the luxuries of central heat in the cold months and air conditioning (a bridge too far for me at this point) in the summer. These all help us forget what our ancestors, recent ones at that, were more sensitive to.
In an opening paragraph of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” we read that “the city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark outside already.” London is about as far north as Calgary, Alberta; its winter nights are much longer and darker than ours. I can never read about darkness in Dickens’ time without reflecting upon where the little illumination the citizens of his time enjoyed came from. Bob Cratchit’s work, mostly copying letters, was carried on by the light of one candle. In homes that could afford it, whale oil fueled their lamps. Outside, in cities like London, natural gas lit the streets. Lamplighters circulated each evening with long-handled tools to ignite them and at dawn to snuff them out. Concert halls, palaces, surgical theaters, and large classrooms were also gas-lit, and fire was a constant threat.
I have a facsimile reproduction of a handwritten script of Dickens’. It’s an incredible tangle of scribbling, balloons and arrows, crossouts, and blobs where his quill pen blooped onto the page. How a compositor, working by candlelight, managed to arrange it all into orderly type for printing beggars imagination.
Abraham Lincoln, it is said, learned to write upon a wooden shovel with charcoal and light from the fireplace. I tried that once many years ago; it was impossible. Our grandparents learned to feed a stove or furnace around the clock, clean and fill the lamps when they needed it, and find their way around the barn and yard in the dark by lamplight, if they could. One of Robert Frost’s most evocative winter poems is “Brown’s Descent” or “The Willy-Nilly Slide.” If you don’t know it, look it up.
Going to bed with the chickens, as the saying goes, is pretty much a thing of the past. It was a pain in the wintertime because it meant you had to get up more often than you do now to feed the stove. This usually involved shuffling down perilously steep stairs in slippers in the dark and opening the stove door to get a little light. Then you had to hope your partner, if you had one, had slid over to keep your side warm while you were gone.
In antiquity, darkness caused more than inconvenience; it signified the discontent of the gods and portended doom and disaster. In the gospels, the crucifixion of Christ is accompanied by three hours of darkness and an earthquake. Thankfully, most of us have shed those fears and can now attribute darkness to astronomical phenomena, volcanic eruptions, or distant fires. But consider for a moment the popular reaction to a strangely shaped object currently approaching us from space. There seems no doubt in many minds that it’s from another civilization, and threatening. In many ways we’re still rolling rocks around and living in caves.
There’s a good reason our midwinter celebrations are centered on fire and light. First of all, fire is warm (Yule log) when the air is frigid; second, even a tiny light is visible in otherwise utter darkness (there’s a reason no one was allowed to smoke on deck at night in wartime convoys). Hanukkah has a historical origin, though it’s clothed in mysticism. The date of Christmas does not; it was moved by the Church to occlude the popular Roman feast of Saturnalia, and is celebrated as the aforementioned triumph of a tiny light over the darkness of a troubled world. Ever optimistic, I look forward to the lengthening days to come as portents of the fortunes of our nation.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
