My (mostly) lonely search for light-minded people | Commentary

I don’t like what’s happened to light.

You know, light, as in “let it shine on you,” “trip fantastic” and “let there be’’ light. That light.

Because something has happened to light – or at least lighting – over the past few years.

I remember flying home and seeing miles of amber lights glowing up from South Florida through the window of the plane. It looked soft and welcoming down there. Like home.

I remember walking by Notre-Dame de Paris years ago and seeing the same light glowing from that stony old cathedral. It looked soft and inviting in there, too. Like a bygone age, locked in amber.

I remember seeing amber lights along my street and thinking, the neighbors and I may disagree on many things, but we at least agree our neighborhood looks lovely in this light. At least at night, when you couldn’t see the lawn ornaments.

But sometime over the past 10 years, something happened to light. Or maybe just lighting.

I was flying home recently and saw miles of silvery lights now glaring up from South Florida. It looked hard and unwelcoming down there. Home, but not quite home.

I passed by Notre-Dame de Paris during its reconstruction a couple of years ago and saw the same silvery lights strung up in scaffolding surrounding the old stones. I haven’t been back since they reopened the cathedral last year, but I hoped they weren’t planning to replace the old lighting because it looked like a surgical suite in there now.

And when I pull into my driveway, only a few of my neighbors still have the amber lights we could all agree once looked beautiful at night. The rest is a strange mix of LED and CFL bulbs, some so bright you can see the lawn ornaments in the dark. Like we’re guarding a correctional facility for gnomes, not a neighborhood.

But not mine. No, I still have a few of the old bulbs stashed away, a temporary shade against the gathering harshness of light. My house still looks like home.

I know I can’t keep it going for much longer. Over the past 10 years, so many of the soft incandescent lights we knew have been snuffed out and replaced with the harder LED and CFL lights. I know they save energy and money, and I’m all for that.

But, along the way, our homes, neighborhoods and other special places in the world have started to look hard and unwelcoming in the harsher light. Insert any metaphors of your own here.

I wondered if anyone else feels the way I do, so I started looking for light-minded people on the internet. It didn’t take long to find them.

“The morose cast of the LED bulb looks one step up from the dread fluorescent, with its grim hue supplying the gray to barely finished basements, the line at the D.M.V. and the waiting room in the E.R. Stark,” wrote New York Times columnist Pamela Paul in a 2023 opinion entitled “A Light Bulb Went Off.” “Things illuminated by LED (human beings, for example) look bad, sullen, even villainous.”

My people, at last … yes! Paul’s column, clearly holding nothing back from how she really feels, lit up the comments field of the Times site. Some pro:

“I loathe CFLs and LEDs,” a reader from Central Oregon wrote. “Migraine-inducing, nasty-looking, cold-fish lighting. I have neurological and sensory issues; fluorescent lights and LEDs casting their weird multi-LED shadows send me over the edge.”

Some con:

“If you’re so nostalgic for the good old days, they’re still selling whale oil lamps,” a reader from Milwaukee wrote.

I would never go that far. There are 40-watt, soft-white LED lights that produce almost the same amber wavelengths I like without going all Moby Dick on the world.

Some even say they don’t mind the silvery light, although they do worry it affects their sleep. For the record, the silvery light doesn’t really bother my sleep. Except when I dream of a world in a better light.

Which may never come now, I know.

I just checked the boxes of old bulbs in the garage. We’re down to one or two more replacements for each light fixture in the house. It won’t be long now. Everywhere I look, a harsher glare’s closing in.

But until then, I’ll keep the light on.

mgauert@cityandshore.com