Last night there was a powerful windstorm. The power was knocked out for a few hours, starting around 1am. The house was plunged into a soft black darkness and silence, save the howling of the wind through the forest, the sound of large boughs heavily crashing against the roof then sliding to the ground below, and the almost blinding spotlight of the near-full moon shining through the bedroom window.

I lay awake in bed listening and unable to get back into a sound sleep. As I spend so much time reading about the pre-electricity era, I thought about what night was like for those people, surrounded by total darkness if there was no celestial light to make shapes or shadows. One didn’t burn a candle all night; it was wasteful and very dangerous. The fire in the hearth would be covered for the same reason, unless its heat was needed in winter but even then, blankets and bodies served that purpose. So they lay in the pitch darkness, or in moonlight, or in starlight, in the serene silence of the world, or the cacophony of nature outside. They got more sleep, because they were more likely to go to bed when it got dark, and sleep more soundly without the distraction of artificial lights.

Can you imagine a lifetime lit only by the sun, the moon, and a flame? And humanity lived that way for thousands of years, up until the very recent past.