Automatic Lights

The lights in the building assume that I want to see everything in blanched fluorescent detail.

I venture inward through the doors in tentative half-step increments, and for a breath of a moment, I see the room as it is... humming demurely in a natural shade of semi-darkness. But just as quickly, the arrival of my plastic tennis shoes on the threshold marks the presence of The Human, and then in a blink my personal kingdom of convenience appears dutifully before me, bathed in sallow artificial light.

There are perks to these automatic lights. I can easily find my chair in lighting like this. Easily open my bag, rummage through my folder, pull out the proper file. The urgent concerns of this present moment can be properly analyzed, efficiently addressed, in the glow of these two dozen burning white tubes. And to the world I live in, the building I move in, it is supremely important to be able to do such things.

But can I feel the eternal hum of the ages, the ebb and flow of time, the rising of the moon, the setting of the sun, in a room with no windows and automatic lights?

Everyone assumes we want the lights on. One step into the valley of shadow and, flash, there is light, harsh and blazing enough to scald the soul. Sooner or later, we come to expect it, come to need it, come to fear the dark rather than learning to see in it. Our night vision has become permanently disabled by this insistence, this assumption that we need every corner illuminated, every shadow dispelled, every mystery solved, everything in its proper place, and nothing left to the imagination.