Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 97, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1917 — SENSE BEING LOST [ARTICLE]

SENSE BEING LOST

LONDONERS UNABLE TO GROPE THEIR WAY IN DARKNESS. Philosophical Review of Warfare's Needs, and of Past D<kys, Has Not Brought Citizens to a Proper J? Realization of Conditions. A few months ago I chanced to be In what official language would describe as “a certain northern town” at the time when lighting restrictions were being newly enforced as a precaution against air attacks. Loud was the outcry of persons who had bumped into the lamppost and tripped over the? curb upon their homeward way, and who. had even found themselves unable to identify their o>vn homes without the aid of an electric torch.*

And yet the curious thing was that even such restricted street lighting as remained would, have been considered a really handsome illumination by our forefathers and -would indeed be considered so today by dwellers in rural districts Where the street lamp is unknown, C. Fox-Smith writes in the London Chronicle. What is happening to us—or, rather, what was happening to us in the days when the daylight, in towns, was deposed before its death by the glare of gas and electric light? Were we not rapidly losing’the very last remnant of that faculty of seeing in what we call “the dark,” which is really quite a natural part of our equipment, being a sort of combination of the senses of sight, smell, touch and hearing? As a matter of fact speaking broadly, what most people call “the dark” is not darkness at all. How often, for example, do you hear a person who has just emerged from or who lifts a blind, to look through the window of a lighted r»om exclaim: “What a pitch dark night!”

But once leave the bewildering lights behind and it will be seen that the apparent darkness was really more than half caused by the light Itself. Pitch darkness seldom exists except comparatively, never without some extraordinary condition,”such as fog or very dense clouds. One dbes, of course, remember one or two such occasions of a blackness Impenetrable as a wall and almost as tangible to all seeming. But they are rare enough to be noticeable—even to cause surprise, as if they were somehow abnormal, which would not he so if pitch darkness were common.

It is rather strange to reflect that, until the coming of the lighting restrictions, most of the present, generation had never really seen the town at dusk. And yet what a peculiar charm there Is now about the coming on of dark in a city. There is. let us frankly admit it, a touch of the sinister about the dark riibuths of narrow streets which by daylight are hut the most commonplace and sordid of routes to the backs of shops and warehouses. But they are for the time romantic, as well as sinister; there.Js a something Stevensonian about them, Stevenson of “Doctor Jekyll” and “The New Arabian Nights.” Darkness is the fairy godmother of commonplace buildings. It brings them gifts of breadth, of massiveness, of dignity. This pinchbeck incrustation, that shoddy bit of construction, it transfigures 'with a wave of its wand. Seen simply as a broad effect of light and shade, or rather of shaddow and deeper shadow, the newest building is at one. with the old, the/ tawdriest with the most austere.

( It was just at the corner of Wellington street the other night that I surprised one of those wonderful moments on the edge of darkness. In the light of its few and shrouded lamps Kingsw’ay gleamed faintly, like a frozen river under stars. Vehicles loomed up fa#‘"nfiiinute and were gone, motorbuses, laden lorries straining toward Waterloo, a motor ambulance with its Red Cross gleaming almost luminous on a white ground like the device on a knight’s shield in a dark forest. The faces of passers-by were seen*in a.moment in the light of a street lamp, then swallowed up in the ’ darkness. And above it all the stars—the same stars that looked upon the shell-racked glory of Verdun, the remnants that were Ypres and Reims; upon the trenches, the hospitals, the silent dead; and the ships at their stately vigil in the northern seas.