The Light That Obscures The Stars

Our nights may be illuminated for our convenience - but at the cost of beauty

Photo by John Fowler on Unsplash

Take a step outside of your door at night and look up. What do you see? A breathtaking spectacle or black, empty nothingness? Endless shimmering stars stretching across the heavens or a black canvas dotted here and there with faint glimmers that might be stars (or passing aeroplanes)? The outcome of this exercise ultimately depends on where your dwelling place resides: the city or the village, the rural or the urban, the wilderness or the urban “jungle”. For in the city, the light of the stars must compete with other lights, the lights of our industrial and electrified age¹.

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Our urban spaces, while giving us so much good, have also taken away from their inhabitants so much of that which is precious from creation: nature, silence and solitude, and clean fresh air. But perhaps one of the most precious things that urban spaces deprive us of is the nightly spectacle of a sky saturated with glimmering celestial bodies. As improbable as it seems, light pollution from our streetlights, headlights, and industries is strong enough to obscure and outshine the light emanating from stars whose sheer size would make our sun seem obsolete. The impossible task that Abraham was given by God to number the stars in the sky, is now well within the realms of possibility for modern urban dwellers who strain to make out the few faintly glimmering stars that remain in the empty void of the city night sky.

We have deprived ourselves of so much beauty, majesty and awe — and we barely seem to even notice.

Perhaps this is one of the plethora of reasons why our modern western societies are so inward-looking and infatuated with self, and thus so prepared to destroy and degrade our natural world: we have lost one of the greatest and starkest reminders of our minuteness and ‘cosmic insignificance’² which puts humanity in its proper place. As I have argued elsewhere, we have lost our sense of awe partly because we are no longer exposed to that which is truly awesome. This dynamic is clearly at play here as instead of being awestruck by the profusion of stars, we are infatuated with a different light — the glow of the innumerable screens which glimmer in our cities and homes. This is the glow of trivial light, addictive light, and profane light — a light emanating forth from pixels shining with the glitters and shimmers of social media, stock market reports, and celebrity gossip.

And it has blinded us to that which is truly awesome.