A light discourse.

[alex_beecroft]

So, it’s worth thinking about light, if you’re writing a historical novel, particularly if you live and/or were brought up in a city. We moderns are as unaware of light as a fish is of water. We switch it on where we need it, and the night goes away in an even wash of colourless white illumination. Even when we switch it off, outside the windows the lamps keep shining and all our streets are yellow and the shadows are madder-brown.

Photographers and painters spend their lives acutely aware of the light – it’s angle, its intensity and its colour, and the fall of the places where it is absent. But writers have a tendency to ignore it, because we are less visual beings and we’re too busy worrying about plot and characterisation, and wondering if we’ve got too much description rather than too little.

I think that’s a shame, because if you’ve ever sat in a room illumined only by candlelight, you’ll know that it’s an entirely different experience from sitting in the same room under electric light. There’s a sense of human impermanence and fragility from the fact that the light is so vulnerable – too sharp a draught and those little flames that flicker so brightly on the end of their wicks could snuff out. The darkness is behind them all, waiting for its chance, and it can be felt, like a prowling presence just outside the protective circle.

Candlelight is also far more beautiful than electric. The colour of candlelight is the colour of the light before a storm – thick, golden and sweet. Garments look richer in it, faces look smoother, soft-focus, dusted with gilding. It’s a warm light that encourages quiet voices and secrets, intimacy and intrigue. And it casts more shadows.

Out there, beyond the charmed circle, outside the light, who knows what lurks? Even the rooms of your house fill up with hidden things, whether that be murder clues or secret trysts or supernatural terrors.

If you’ve ever walked outside, in the countryside, where there is no light pollution, on an overcast night, on your own, you’ll know you can feel buried alive even in the open air. And if you’ve done the same under a full moon, when the sky is indigo and green as a bad bruise, and all the world is tricksy silver-blue, you’ll appreciate how hard it was for our ancestors not to believe in elves and wights and headless horsemen. Under that lunatic light, you can practically see them wherever you look.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft.

Comments

[bimo]

Read and very much enjoyed! :)

There's a special quality to candle light that is incredibly hard to capture by artificial means, even with the best of technological equipment. What you wrote about colour, intensity and fragility instantly reminded me of the incredible struggle that Stanley Kubrick underwent back in the 1970s when he was filming Barry Lyndon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Principal_photography

[alex_beecroft]

Ooh, I didn't know about that film at all, but now I must look it up - it sounds amazing. And it is surprising how the quality of the light changes the quality of your thinking. I swear we humans are not as independent of our environment as we like to think. Thanks!

[sharpiefan]

You're waxing very poetical!

If you ever get the chance to go outside on a clear night in a place where there is no light pollution, look up at the stars.

I spent a large amount of my childhood in Africa, and I still remember how the stars looked as though someone had tipped hundreds of thousands of millions of diamonds across a swathe of black velvet. Beautiful.

I miss that, living in England where there's light pollution everywhere.

[alex_beecroft]

*g* It's hard not to write love poetry to light ;) (It is for me, anyway, as I get SAD and so I'm very aware of light levels, or the lack of them, at this time of year. I end up craving light like chocolate.)

Oh, that sounds wonderful! I live in a rural part of the fens and see more stars here than I have ever before, but there are still streetlamps and clouds to contend with. I'd have loved to see that.

[darkemeralds]

What beautiful images.

I've struggled with the problem of light in historical writing--how, unless there was a full moon and a clear sky, night travel was incredibly dangerous if not impossible; how very dark the stairs and corridors would be in a house at night; how much people's lives were governed by night and day.

I don't think it's possible to overestimate the importance of this "detail" in any historical writing set before Thomas Edison did his thing.

[alex_beecroft]

Thank you :) And yes, it's such a big factor in how people behaved and even in how they thought, and we've almost eliminated it from our lives, in the same way that in the West we've (almost) got rid of the constant threat of famine, and therefore the obsession with/rejoicing in a good harvest. It's good not to have to worry about being without, but it's a shame we stop appreciating the good things when we have enough of them.

[gehayi]

I learned this recently thanks to a horror of a freak snowstorm. It did not take me long to HATE candlelight. And I was grateful to have light--ANY light! But what I noticed, with my poor vision, was that candlelight was dim and almost impossible to see by. It creates a light within the darkness, but it does not push the darkness back. And it's a strain to read by candlelight; the light flickers and creates the most god-awful shadows on book pages.

The blackout and the candles both made me feel blind, for all my life I'd heard about how much you could see by the light of one candle. Instead, I would be holding a candlestick with a lit candle and there would be illumination around the candle flame...but no more. It didn't light up what lay ahead of me or to the side or ANYTHING. I couldn't see by it, couldn't do ANYTHING useful by it, and it made me wonder how so many characters in real life and in fiction could have sewed or woven or knit or baked by the light of a candle. Everything that I'd heard about candlelight was wrong. Eventually I decided that they must have all had Superman vision.

[alex_beecroft]

That's true. I certainly gave up trying to read, the last time we had a power cut. I found that I *could*, if I sat with the candle about 50cm away from the book (so in practice, just over my shoulder.) But that meant there was no light for the rest of the people in the room. I'm sure having lots more candles lit at once would have helped, but think of the expense.

I find that for me a single candle shows enough of what's around me so that I can find doors and not bump into walls, which turns navigating around the house into a much simpler matter than it would be without the candle. I guess that you can knit and sew pretty much by touch, just bringing the piece up to the light if you need to check something. But you certainly need lots of candles to make a light that's really useful, and even then it will be brown.