Romeo:
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops-
Juliet:
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
The moon is “inconstant” because, as Juliet says, it waxes and wanes, month on month. Everybody knows that. But I am forty-six years old—I have lived in cities, suburbs, the countryside, a small town—and I only learnt about a month ago that one can tell from which side is shining whether the moon is waxing or waning.
This speaks poorly of my powers of observation, and also of attention, as I was surely taught this at some point. But more noteworthy is that I would have to be taught it at all. For Shakespeare’s audience, as for all men and women before his age, and for a few centuries afterwards, the patterns of the moon were not something one was taught, like the alphabet or the catechism, but something one simply knew, like knowing that water quenches thirst or that the sun brings heat.
Ancient poetry—all poetry until the twentieth century—is replete not just with moons, but with planets and constellations, named and linked with the time of night and the time of year. Modern editors diligently footnote all these heavenly bodies, from which few modern readers retain more than some vague notion such as “it’s got something to do with the season”. But the poets were not here being obscure or learned: they were pointing to aspects of the world which, however redolent of beauty and mystery, were phenomena whose names and visible patterns were known to all.
Ancient poetry—all poetry until the twentieth century—is replete moons, planets and constellations.
Today anyone who has been through standard schooling knows that the moon is a nearby rock which gets its light from the sun; that the planets rotate around the sun; that the stars are unfathomably distant other suns; and many other wondrous discoveries. But this is school-knowledge, and it can exist (as in my case) quite independently of all but the most rudimentary experience of what the sky actually looks like, night on night, season on season. Indeed even that is seldom learnt through pure observation—there are apps for it.
The cause of this change is of course the universal electrification of the world, which has fundamentally altered our relationship with light. We may still love the sunlight and moonlight, and all life still depends on them. But that too is school-knowledge, except for farmers and gardeners. The sun and moon do not bend to our will, and now we rarely have to bend to theirs. The light we need, for work and leisure, is the sort that pours out at the flick of a switch or the swipe of a screen.
The universal electrification of the world has fundamentally altered our relationship with light.
The sun remains hard to ignore: we are still creatures of the day. But the night has been reduced to an inconvenience we have conquered. Even if we spend much of the time in this new kingdom of ours sleeping, the darkness does not force us to bed or even to release from toil. And a dark night or a moon-drenched one all are the same: mere background to the streetlights and car-lights that are our true constellations.
As with every revolutionary change of the machine age, the disappearance of the night sky has meant a loss of something one could not even imagine could be lost till it was gone. Whether to grieve at this loss is a matter of taste, but grief will in any case be as fruitless, at least in this world, as grief for the dead—we cannot undo electrification and bring back the night sky. We do not even know how to stop inventing and then adopting revolutionary technologies of convenience—let alone rowing back on any of these adoptions. We have built a world where electricity is no less necessary than water, while moonlight is a mere postcard pleasure. We cannot unbuild it, cannot even really want to unbuild it.
Perhaps the moon’s “circled orb” is more beautiful, now that we have to seek it out. But it is very hard to see—and who would want Romeo to swear by the unfailing, unblinking constancy of an LED lightbulb?
