The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. Paul Bogard

get the feeling someone who says “Then send your wife and kids into the darkness and see what happens, or ask a rape victim what they think” isn’t going to be dissuaded by Clark’s study or any other study. Dare to question the idea that we need lots and lots of bright lights for safety and, as Martin Morgan-Taylor of the Campaign for Dark Skies told me in London, “It will often raise quite an aggressive response from people, because it really is the fear of the dark, isn’t it?”

      “This most ancient of human anxieties,” explains historian Roger Ekirch, “has existed from time immemorial … Night was man’s first necessary evil, our oldest and most haunting terror.” The reasons—rational, even—that we have feared the dark of night are many: threats from wild animals, attacks from robbers or highwaymen, deadly terrain, and especially fire. Add to those reasons our propensity for irrational fears such as ghosts, witches, werewolves, and vampires and we had plenty of reason to fear the dark. Regardless of which came first—the rational or irrational—as we evolved, those fears were kept intense by the human eye’s limited ability in the dark and our imagination’s vivid ability to see night’s demons all too well. Christianity, which saw Christ as “light eternal” and Satan as Prince of Darkness, further ingrained this view of the world. In the eyes of the church, continues Ekirch, “the devil embraced darkness, literally as well as metaphorically. Night alone magnified his powers and emboldened his spirit. Indeed, darkness had become Satan’s unholy realm on earth.”

      But most of us no longer fear attack by wild animals, deadly terrain, or fire at night; nor do we recall our last encounter with a highwayman. And while we love them in movies, we don’t normally fear meeting witches, ghosts, or werewolves in the dark—or at least, we don’t admit we do.

      No, now we fear each other.

      Three miles northwest of downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the campus of Wake Forest University, a highly ranked school that is home to more than seven thousand students, lies embraced by quiet residential neighborhoods or estates on all sides. This is where I work, where I experience night’s darkness on a regular basis—leaving my office on a winter’s early evening, returning after dinner to hear a visiting speaker, walking with Luna. A leafy tree canopy made of magnolias and maples, dogwood and pines, covers walkways and streets and pedestrian squares, the brick buildings made in the Georgian style. Wait Chapel rises at the north end of the main quad, spotlights on its steeple, while other lighting includes both the old and the new: security lights and wallpacks and cobraheads, but also fully shielded streetlights, “dark sky–friendly” acorns, and other attractive Victorian fixtures. A recently commissioned report on campus lighting states as a goal to “continue the intimate feel of campus.”

      “And that means a balance of darkness and light,” says Jim Alty, vice president for facilities. “If you want to be out with your girlfriend, or if you want to talk with a colleague or classmate, you don’t want to be in a brightly lit space that’s making you squint. So our idea is to offer pathways that are well-lit but, once you get away from the pathways, not trying to make it look like Times Square.”