I remember another ruined moon-viewing, the year we took a boat on the night of the harvest full moon and sailed out over the lake of the Suma Temple. We put together a party, we had our refreshments in lacquered boxes, we set bravely out. But the margin of the lake was decorated brilliantly with electric lights in five colors. There was indeed a moon if one strained one’s eyes for it. So benumbed are we nowadays by electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination.
Jun ‘ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
We didn’t talk much. We just lay there and looked up at the stars.
“Too much light pollution,” he said.
“Too much light pollution,” I answered.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe
When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments. Hahaha! (Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)
Jenny Offill, Weather
When I was a little boy Calcutta city was not so wakeful at night as it is now. Nowadays, as soon as the day of sunlight is over, the day of electric light begins. [...] The nerves of the city are throbbing still with the fever of thought which has burned all day in her brain. [...] But in those old times which we knew, when the day was over whatever business remained undone wrapped itself up in the black blanket of the night and went to sleep in the darkened ground-floor premises of the city. Outside the house the evening sky rqge quiet and mysterious. It was so still that we could hear, even in our own street, the shouts of the grooms from the carriages of those people of fashion who were returning from taking the air in Eden Gardens by the side of the Ganges.
Rabindranath Tagore, My Boyhood Days