Nightfaring: In Search of the Disappearing Darkness

Travel writer Eaves-Egenes (Lonely Planet’s Best of London) delivers an enthralling exploration of humanity’s relationship with the dark. Today, blazing city lights and thousands of orbiting satellites fill the night sky, washing out stars to the point that most people can no longer see the Milky Way. To better understand what’s been lost, Eaves-Egenes traveled to dark-sky locations around the world—from New Mexico to Mount Everest to Argentina. She finds that across cultures and throughout history, humans have had an intimate connection to the night sky; the Maori people of New Zealand use stars as cues for planting and spiritual rituals, and the Ladakhi in the Himalayas incorporate the study of stars into medicinal practices. At the same time, fear of the dark remains a common phobia, perhaps dating back to prehistoric ancestors who were vulnerable to predators at night. Eaves-Egenes confronted this fear by attending a four-day darkness retreat at a monastery in Germany, which gave her “the ability to simply be, with no agenda, task, or need.” The disappearance of darkness as outdoor light levels increase impacts everyone, she explains, disrupting circadian rhythms and sleep cycles and wreaking havoc on plants and animals. Throughout, she combines captivating history and science with evocative personal reflections (“The more time I spent in darkness, the more it seemed to heal me”). Readers will be moved and enlightened. (Mar.)