No aphorism of Horace
perhaps, but still
cousinly and
in wide practice
ever since fiat lux
and the tungsten
armies of Thomas
Edison began
to spread the net --
not so much a banishing
of the darkness
(the sun would never
allow this),
but a taming
or domestication
of its wavelength,
making the night seem
less worrisome,
less viral, less filled
with menace.
Not that we could
ever completely forget
on any tribal level
what the night once
meant to us, our ids
are too stained
for that. Hence, why
ghosts and the other monsters
have simply followed us indoors,
to the artificial dark
of the cineplex, while
astronomers and other
predators have largely
moved on to digital realms,
where light and shade
are tallied in 1s and 0s
and black holes
(the milk-carton children
of the cosmos) are seduced
more by algorithms
than lost puppies. And while
Death itself (the ultimate
expression of starless skies)
has been delayed
or offset by Apollonian
advances in modern medicine,
this too is artifice, like
the wearing of sunglasses
at night. We must therefore
take heed.
Even as the world's albedo
grows, to turn
our back on the oldest scourge
in our history,
to put it at technical remove,
thinking this somehow
makes us safer, may be to
our own peril.
Or as Horace never wrote:
Carpe noctem ne nox te carpat.
Seize the night, yes.
Just be careful
lest it return with a vengeance.
