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Just the other night during my radio program I mentioned a TV commercial that ran sometime back. It was a commercial that showed a migraine sufferer being affected by all the light in her apartment. She goes to great lengths to extinguish every light source. She even pulls the plug on the phone because the lighted dial and numbers cause her pain. And then she takes a remote control, aims it at the office building in the distance, seen through her living room picture window, and when she hits “enter”, all the lights in the office tower are extinguished, leaving her in blessed darkness.
Tomorrow night in Toronto, and in cities all over the world, the lights will be turned off early for one hour. It’s called Earth Hour, designed to conserve electricity and also bring attention to global climate change. You’re being asked to dim your lights between 8 and 9 p.m. to show your support of this very important issue. The second hour of my radio show tonight will feature some thoughts on all this.
There used to be an old-time radio show called “Lights Out” that you wouldn’t want to listen to alone in the dark. It was great theatre of the mind.
My blog is short tonight, but I wanted to conclude with another thought about “light.” It’s an excerpt from the 1990 edition of The Friendship Book of Francis Gay published by D. C. Thomson and Company. Francis Gay writes: “In the remote country areas of India, lighting is still by simple oil lamps. In one village temple there hangs from the ceiling a great brass structure with numerous places into which small oil lamps will fit. There are no lamps in the structure itself, so the temple is in darkness until the people come in to worship, each family with its little lamp to guide them along the dark roads. Entering the temple, they put their lamps into a place in the great brass fitting, and so, gradually, the temple grows brighter until, when all the places are occupied, the interior is a blaze of light. Yes, it is the people themselves who bring the light to the temple. If they ignored their temple, there would be no light and no worship–only utter darkness.”
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Don Jackson
