Paul Bogard: The End of Night.

A square inch of silence and a black night sky full of stars. These are two experiences which are becoming hard to find, and difficult to remember. 'The End of Night' chronicles Bogard's efforts to rediscover and rekindle our relationship with the night, and to remind us of the importance of unpolluted darkness. Ironically then the image that fuels these efforts is of a snowstorm. Bogard offers a memory of his eighteen year old backpacker self walking into a snowstorm, on the edge of the Sahara desert, except that the snow isn't snow, but a swirl of stars from one horizon to the other, swirling in a darkness that has depth and structure.

From that darkness Bogard's first stop is the Las Vegas strip, the brightest real estate in the world, where the brightest beam of light on Earth shoots into space from the apex of the Luxor casino's black pyramid. This is a Bortle Class Nine sky, the brightest kind, the kind that is setting the trend for a planet that is losing its darkness. And Las Vegas is a striking example of the trend. "In less than a human lifetime," Bogard points out, "what was almost an entirely dark place grew to the brightest place in the world." What was not so long ago dark desert land is now illuminated by ten million bulbs.

Much of the book is about how this increasing illumination is effecting our experiences of the night-time. Disappearing are the days, or rather nights, when one could stare into a sky full of stars, contemplating the universe and one's place in it, dreaming and breathing in its beauty. By way of a personal pilgrimage, in a somewhat hushed and sober part of the book, and in an effort to rediscover a little of these lost nights, Bogard journeys to the Massachussetts woods where Henry David Thoreau lived alone from 1845 - 1847 to, in his own words, "live deliberately." Here Bogard follows Thoreau's ghost through the "real darkness", Bortle Class 1 darkness, the darkness of stars and introspection and wildness. Here, as elsewhere in the book, there is a sense of the existential, human significance of our connection with wildness, in all of its forms - "the unknown, the mysterious, the creative, the feminine, the animal, the dark." There is, Bgard argues, a primitive kind of humanity, a more fundamental, essential kind of humanity, that diminishes as the connection becomes more tenuous.

As well as the existential, psychological impact of ever brighter skies, 'The End of Night' also looks at the ecological impact. From birds and bats drawn far from their natural feeding habitats to feast on the swarms of insects caught in the thirty-nine 7000 watt lamps of the Luxor Sky Beam, too tired to fly back to their young, to newborn sea turtles unable to find their way to the ocean because of the bright sodium lights of beach communities, to nocturnal migrating birds confusedly circling lit towers until they drop dead from exhaustion, to the fish, insects and plants whose internal circadian rhythms have evolved in synchronicity with the cycle of night and day, darkness and light, and are now upset by the artificial extension of the day. Bogard points to the impacts of "the blitzkrieg of artificial light" on not only the orientation and circadian rhythms, but also the predation and reproduction of the thirty per cent of vertebrates and sixty something per cent of invertebrates that are nocturnal. We are, he says, only beginning to understand the full ecological impact of this "blitzkrieg", but it seems intuitively logical that these turtles, birds, bats, fish and plants cannot have had the evolutionary time to fully adapt. It is the book's exploration of the different impacts of this evolutionary shortfall, as regards animals and plants, but also humans, that offers much of it's appeal.

The World Health Organisation now lists night shift work as a probable carcinogen, owing in large part to reduced levels of melatonin, ordinarily produced when the body senses darkness. With this information Bogard introduces perhaps the most resonant section of the book, in which he explores the impacts of disrupted circadian rhythms in humans. To do so he follows and talks to a few of the twenty million American night shift workers, the cleaners and caretakers, the drivers, nurses and service industry workers. There is the woman who has existed for years on two or three hours of sleep a day, the locomotive engineers who fall asleep on the job, and a nurse who drives home with her pony-tail trapped in her car's sun roof to jerk her awake should she fall asleep. All of them are awake during their biological night, when their physiology is telling them to sleep. All of them talk of fatigue and disrupted sleep patterns, depression or illness. Most of them are African Americans. These are sobering human stories. They are also, because of their familiarity, and because also of their seeming inevitability, tragic.

If much of 'The End of Night' explores the negative impacts, human, existential and ecological, of artificial light and brighter nights, as much or more relishes and celebrates the beauty of darkness, and also the beauty of darkness in interplay with good, directed lighting. One of the book's most beautiful and absorbing passages has Bogard walking the streets of Paris (the City of Light) at night with Francoise Jousse, the engineer responsible for lighting most of the city's monuments, bridges and boulevards. Walking with Jousse and listening to him expound on the ideas, designs and practicalities of lighting the Notre-Dame cathedral (there are, for instance, two spotlights directed towards the cathedral which are hidden inside two book stalls on the sidewalk across the Seine) the Tour St.-Jacques ("the light falls from the top, and when it reaches the ground it makes a splash.") or the Pont des Arts bridge (illuminated by projectors under the bridge facing the river) is like being lead by the hand through the hidden passageways and undiscovered dimensions of a sleeping city, its treasures and secrets revealed by its custodian and architect, it's beauty brought out by the interplay of darkness and light.

The beauty of darkness is celebrated also in a study of Van Gogh's oil painting, Die Sterrenacht (Starry Night), which hangs in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Painted in 1889 from his sanitarium window at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, it depicts a swirling night sky with yellow-white stars and a crescent moon, and at the bottom of the canvas, a few orange gas-lights in the windows of houses. Bogard dismisses the idea that the sky in this painting is entirely an impressionistic expression of the artist's madness, or of his frenzied energy, and puts the idea instead that this is a painting of a time and a sky that no longer exist. It is, Bogard argues, an imaginary sky "inspired by a real sky of a kind few of the fifty million MoMA visitors have ever seen," a sky before electricity, when the swirling white of the Milky Way and the flashes of red, green, yellow, orange and blue in the stars were there for all to see, unhidden, unpolluted.

This then is a book of images, of a snowstorm of stars, of a beam of light, of bats and circling birds, of splashes of light and a swirling Milky Way.  It is also a book of stories, of ghosts from the past and ghosts in the night. It is part pilgrimage and part polemic. But most of all, it is an invitation, offered in earnest, to rediscover and remember the value and meaning of darkness.