EARTH HOUR. (Note the caps.) This is important.

I love looking out from my balcony when the city is as dark as it is possible for it to be. When I lived up north (near-north) for a while (16 years) I really enjoyed a power outage. I had my fireplace for warmth and cooking (I had a special grid on the andirons that enabled me to cook over the coals) and I had candles and kerosene lamps. If the power came on too soon, i.e. before the evening was over, I left the lights off because I was enjoying my cosy arrangements.

But this brief deprivation of light surely illuminates (meaning intended) Marshall McLuhan's statement that electric light is information. When people went to bed in the dark -- oh dear, here comes another tangent: Remember Robert Louis Stevenson's children's poem:

In winter I go to bed at night/And have to dress by candlelight./In summer it's just the other way/I have to go to bed by day....

So, unless you were like Thomas Jefferson, who invented a lovely writing chair with wide arms on both sides, each mounted with a candle-holder so that he could see to write well past dark - as I say - unless you were like him, you probably went to bed. I don't mean You, I mean, less ambitious, less literate people in that time who were content to dream. (That would be nice, actually.)

Anyway, those are thoughts that drift across my mind as I prepare for my #darkmoment, or whatever "they" are calling it this week in preparation. I think we should have a glass of wine and toast the darkness.

Hello darkness, my old friend.