/ part 01
"Light is more terrible than darkness"
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Recently, I saw such a news that a 7-year-old girl in Changsha, Hunan Province, slept with a small night light all year round, resulting in premature breast development. In fact, the harm of night lights has long been common sense, it will reduce the secretion of pituitary hormones and melatonin in children, which in turn affects the body's growth and sleep quality, and promotes precocious puberty.
In addition, the light of the night light also has a significant inhibitory effect on the development of the child's eyeball.
Not long ago, the world's authoritative medical journal "Cancer" is also reminding the public that too strong light at night will increase the chance of thyroid cancer, especially for women; these common night light sources include night lights, mobile phones, tablets, and outdoor street and car lights, and so on.
This reminds me of Paul Borgard's book, The End of the Night. One of the themes that the book has always emphasized is that our dark night is at risk of loss, and now it has become brighter and brighter. Yes, "Let the city light up", which was once a loud slogan of our municipal construction. Thus, colorful lights banished the night, and the illumination throughout the night existed only for beauty and conquest.
We have easily succeeded in driving out the night, but we do not know what we have lost at the same time. Paul Borgard tells us: "The natural darkness of the night is invaluable to the health of the human body, to the sound ecological environment of nature, and once the natural dark environment is lost, it will cause harm to all living things, some of which we have known for a long time, and some of which we are only beginning to understand now." "That is to say, to lose the night is to lose our health." We are sensitive to air pollution, sensitive to noise pollution, but we can be numb to the pollution of light.
Obviously, we have forgotten the purpose of the lights: "The earliest lights were only to make people see clearly what was on the road, not to completely illuminate the night." "Once upon a time, almost every family had a flashlight, which was a basic household appliance that was necessary in the era of poverty. Today, we don't need it much anymore, and all kinds of street lights have illuminated the night bright enough. Those rays even broke into our room. In the past, the literary works often used to describe the dark night of "reaching out and not seeing five fingers" is an unimaginable situation for us today.
We all know that the excessive light is not only for the sake of dressing up the night, but also for safety reasons. For some, especially women, the darkness itself is fraught with uncertainty, and there may be factors of insecurity lurking in this uncertainty, the most worrying of which is crime. There is no doubt that adequate night lighting gives people a sense of security.
However, Australian astronomer Barry Clark concluded in 2002 based on a number of related research studies: "There is not enough evidence to prove that street lights can inhibit crime, but there is sufficient evidence that darkness can inhibit crime." Although such objections are based on a large number of facts, arguments are still inevitable, because the conclusions provided by Barry Clarke do not fundamentally eliminate people's fear of the night.
/ part 02
"For the sake of beauty, I want to belong to the night forever"
I think the crux of the problem is the binary opposition between night and lighting. We can't do without street lights, but we can't just destroy the night. Or is Paul Borgard right: "Moderate lighting can make us safer, but the real safety comes from being alert to our surroundings, not by using the human instinct to fear the dark as an excuse to make the night brighter and brighter." ”
Moreover, the night itself is not the same as fear, and I always vividly remember an essay my daughter wrote when she was 10 years old, entitled "The Beauty of the Sea at Night":
Whenever summer vacation comes, I will go to Weihai with my parents for a vacation. One night, I couldn't sleep in bed, so I quietly ran down to see the sea. The sea at night ripples slightly under the night sky, which is very beautiful. The bright stars above the sea are reflected on the sea, the sea breeze gently blows them, one or two small boats on the shore look particularly energetic under the background of the sea, and several reefs on the sea side become dazzling, and the sea looks picturesque under the illumination of the stars.
I gently pushed open the doorknob, and the general fresh air came to my nose, which made me forget the troubles of yesterday, and walked from an inner dark world to a new world, and the gentle sea breeze blew my hair, making me understand that the world is not only black and white, but also color. The sea lapping at the reef from time to time made me understand to be confident and strong and never back down.
The sea under the starry sky is as white as jade, and the connotation is rich, just like a picture scroll that cannot be read, and a poem that cannot be read. Gradually, the sound of the waves of the sea was like a lullaby, causing me to climb back into bed again, gently close my eyes, and fall asleep.
The sea at night is really colorful!
You see, for a 10-year-old girl, the night does not bring her instinctive fear, but a different kind of beauty that cannot be given to her during the day, and the mood that there is no time to take care of in the daytime.
As a child, to save, we could only have a 15-watt incandescent lamp in our room. There is no light, only shadows and shadows, as faint as candlelight. This piece of dusk is not for viewing, it is purely the lighting we must cherish. After a meal, we always have to turn it off as soon as possible, and then sit on the windowsill and look up at the stars, which is the most exciting time of the day. It was then that I realized that the night must be richer than the day. Therefore, I refused to go to sleep for a long time, and I could not bear to say goodbye to the mysterious world that connected reverie and eternity. It seems that night makes me feel more intimate than day, and it has a more infinite embrace than day.
Later, I read Tanizaki Junichiro's "Tribute to The Yin", and the yin that he praised countless times brought me back to those nights of my childhood: "Beauty does not exist in objects, but in the ripples and light and darkness of the yin and the yin produced by things and things." The night pearl can be placed on a dark prescription to shine, and the gem is exposed to the sun to lose its charm. Without the effect of yin, there is no beauty. "Yes, for the sake of beauty, I am willing to belong to the night forever, to entrust myself to listening, to the worries of the romantics.
Years later, in my article "My Night," I wrote, "I belong to the night, and the night belongs to me." I have always seen myself as the lonely night watchman of the earth, because the dark nights of this era are always threatened with theft. Alas, the people of this era are too much inclined to day and too much to act. "I see that the night I love is being driven and encroached upon by the bright light of consumerism, becoming naked and ashamed. Such a naked night deeply hurt me, and I could not forgive my love for being helpless, so I had to close my sinful eyes.
/ part 03
"To hurt the night is to hurt humanity itself"
At this moment, I do not know that as early as 1928, Henry Beston had begun to call for the crisis of the night with his book "The Distant House", saying: "Our wonderful human civilization has become disconnected from many aspects of nature, and no one in connection is the night of nature." Primitive people gathered around the campfire at the mouth of the cave were not afraid of the night; they were afraid of the power and energy that the night gave to other animals; we, the people of the machine age, although we used the light to eliminate the fear of the night, but with it disappeared the appreciation of the night. As more and more lights increase, we expel the sacredness and beauty of the night to the forest and the sea; in the small village, at the intersection of dusk, we can no longer see that sacredness and beauty. ”
The results go far beyond that, with Paul Borgard cautioning: "Ever since artificial lighting has pierced the billion-year-old dark night sky, some species have suddenly found themselves at increased risk of being preyed upon, and predators can now easily spot their prey." "The fireflies of my childhood, which I have always missed and fascinated, have disappeared in my adult life for this reason. At the same time, there is also the silence of the night, and the silence that is dedicated to us only at night.
Oh, and in addition to the sound, there is a smell. Paul Borgard said: "The same is true of smell, and the smell of the night is particularly abundant. Warm hot air during the day will take away the smell of the surface, and when the temperature becomes lower at night and the wind is gentler, the surface will emit various odors, allowing the smelling organisms to obtain relevant information. "Since we have destroyed the night, these rich smells are bound to disappear with it.
Nature makes us, and our harm to nature is also harm to ourselves. Just as we hurt the night with bright lights, we are actually hurting ourselves: "More and more scientists are beginning to notice that many of the symptoms are related to the life style of the night shift, and the source of these diseases is likely to be because we use artificial lighting to subvert the interaction between humans and the night for many years." The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer has listed nighttime as one of the carcinogenic factors, and researchers are exploring the association between night shifts and health problems such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. More seriously, residents of almost all developed countries are no longer able to avoid the potential effects of electric lights at night. ”
Doctors often warn people of the dangers of staying up late, but what they notice is often only the effects of lack of sleep on the body, but seriously ignore the hidden damage caused by light to their health. Richard Stevens, who published his first paper in 1987 exploring the relationship between lighting and cancer, noted in which he noted: "As we use electric lights more and more frequently at night, the line between day and night becomes more and more blurred, which may lead to the result that breast cancer is becoming more common in modern society and at increasing risk in developed countries." However, such harm is not limited to women, and other researchers have found that nighttime lighting is completely proportional to men's chances of developing prostate cancer.
It's not just the night in the city that worries us, but even the longest, purest, and most peaceful night on earth in the Arctic is under threat. Based on global warming, the Arctic atmosphere will reflect back the sunlight reflected from the ground, resulting in the Arctic night sky is also "eclipsed".
2021．10．22
Beijing Gel Zhai
【Topic of this issue】Are you afraid of the night? Feel free to leave a message in the comments section.