Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. The man who’d sat down opposite me was an eminent professor. My erstwhile friends to the left and right of me had fled the field of battle and were engaged intently in conversations with their less intimidating peers. After 20 years of non-stop inane babble, I was tongue- tied and useless. It was strangely like being on a first date and realising that you have nothing in common with the person you’re now socially obliged to spend the next few hours with. Or, at least, that’s what I imagine this would be like: dating is something you do with excavated archaeological samples. That’s not a joke about the age of my potential partners. This is a serious business, you know?
The generational and intellectual divide between my dinner companion and I was vast. I knew I couldn’t launch into a rant about films he hadn’t seen, or the deeper meanings behind Facebook stickers. What I needed was to find something in common, but, at the same time, wasn’t an objectionable choice for light and fluffy intercourse. Death’s remorseless scythe seemed cruel to talk about while I was still in the flushes of rosy-cheeked youth. Any mention of academia and I’d quickly reveal myself to be an imbecile. Finally, to much relief, I hit upon the issue of the day: the clocks were going back. Until the Tardis becomes a reality, we all have to share the same time. We could happily chat about the rationality of Daylight Saving Time until there was no daylight left to save. The mundane salvation we craved had been found.
“Changing the clocks gives you a bizarre feeling of secret power, doesn’t it? When else do we get to manufacture time?”
Like a chess Grandmaster who’d just triggered an inexorable slide towards checkmate, I leaned back in my chair. Your heroic protagonist, one: social anxiety, nil.
“Of course,” opined he, “it’s completely necessary. The barbarians of Europe can wake up to work in the darkness if they want, but the day hasn’t really started until the sun rises.”
Darkness and sleep; sleep and darkness; they should go together like Sinatra’s love and marriage, right? (Ol’ Blue Eyes himself loved marriage so much that he did it four times, and he still had the cheek to sing that song. I mean, I love Test Match Special, but I’m not going to propose to Jonathan Agnew.) The conversation reminded me that I’d read somewhere a theory that humans used to lie dormant for 12 hours in the winter; four hours asleep, four hours awake, and four asleep again. Little of use could be accomplished without the sun; flickering firelight impractical for hunting or farming.
Did our ancestors just spend this time watching the shadows, and waiting for dawn? Today, we can banish darkness at a moment’s notice; there’s nothing to fear from it. Everywhere we look it has been conquered. We know that the statistical likelihood of any as-yet undiscovered monsters lurking therein is about as high as a tungsten kite. None of this rationalisation prevented you, as a child, when the power went out, from huddling in the living room with your family, from risking infernos with poorly-constructed tea-light candles, from searching vainly for hand-held torch batteries. Even when you knew that in a few hours the lights would be back again.
You’re not alone or foolish in this; we stuck a jagged non-linear jump and a broken-record replay into the year so that we could stay in natural light for as long as possible. We’re so far from the darkness that used to be everywhere that in many countries you have to trek for miles from human civilisation just to see the stars at night; and when you do, you’re amazed that there are so many.
We are feeble candles. Our little hearts pump lukewarm blood around a body not that much warmer than the world outside. It’s winter and if you leave your house in an unwise choice of clothes and walk far enough you will freeze. The light we emit is in the infrared spectrum; its peak wavelength is somewhere close to 9.5 microns; it can’t be seen by human eyes. We need artificial aids to dispense with darkness. If anyone appears to be glowing particularly bright to you, it’s all in your head.
There’s not much that resembles the prehistoric phenomenon of being forced to wait for hours in the dark with fewer distractions than we have now; but, if you’re looking on the bright side, it’s pleasant to think that maybe all of this forced waking-waiting gave our forebears time to think. It’s possible, probable, that most of what we think of as culture: storytelling, mythology, music, philosophy – only begun to emerge from the bustle and business of day-to-day survival in the wee small hours when darkness held sway.
Maybe this was the beginning of the great deception; transforming the world from what it really is, and what it is when we’re not looking at it, into something more habitable, more palatable: erecting the scaffolding of civilisation to convince ourselves that the universe is something we can see and understand.
Eventually we’d fulfilled our social obligations and it became acceptable to leave: so we left, paths diverging, each one headed towards a different source of light.
