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In Search of the Disappearing Darkness
by Megan Eaves-Egenes
Book Reviewed by:A heartfelt exploration of the night on Earth, following a travel journalist and dark sky advocate around the globe as she seeks out dark places in our ever-brightening world.
People, plants and animals all depend on the natural night—both its darkness and its starlight—for so much, from regulating our sleep cycles to providing the inspiration for myths and legends across the millennia. But darkness is disappearing, and with it, our view of the stars. The constant glow of streetlights, of headlights streaming down highways, and wasteful glare from skyscrapers left shining all night have created so much light pollution that the majority of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way or experience the restful embrace of a natural night. As the dark becomes ever more elusive, it is a critical moment to stop, look up, and consider what we lose with the disappearing stars.
In Nightfaring, Megan Eaves-Egenes travels around the world to better understand our deep connection to the dark. Finding solace in the stars at a time of difficulty in her own life, she embarks on a journey from New Zealand to Uzbekistan, Italy to Japan, Germany to the Himalaya, exploring the many ways that humans have depended on, feared, and mythologized darkness.
Blending travel and nature writing with history and self-discovery, Megan writes of how the stars have helped her chart the course of her own life—just as they've guided humankind for as long as we've slept beneath them.
Going into the Dark
It's cold. I'm not sure how cold because I haven't checked my phone, but the temperature has been dropping since the Sun set hours ago. A layer of frost on the garden table sparkles from light spilling out of a neighbor's upstairs window.
I park myself on one of the frosting-over chairs facing south. South is the best direction to look when stargazing in London. This is especially true if you are south of the River Thames because you are facing away from the center of the city, the main source of light at night. In winter at this latitude, to the south, there is a reasonable view of the seasonal highlights in the sky: Orion, Sirius, Capella, the twin stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini, and my favorite, a little cluster of stars called the Pleiades.
I am a winter person. I grew up at a high elevation in the southwestern United States, and the arid winds are in my blood because sitting outside in cold weather and looking at the winter sky is my idea of ...
Megan Eaves-Egenes, a travel writer known for her work on Lonely Planet, has dedicated herself to the preservation of the night sky. In Nightfaring, she journeys from location to location—a small English village with no streetlights, a hill in Uzbekistan where a medieval astronomer plied his trade, a health resort in Japan with a focus on the benefits of darkness—to take in the majesty of the night while also highlighting how thoroughly modern society has pushed it to the margins. Eames-Egenes wisely keeps most of her focus on the night sky and the ways of life surrounding it. The autobiographical elements, as important as they undoubtedly are to the author, aren't quite as interesting. Her prose, while functional, doesn't do enough to make these segments feel like more than asides. But the meat of the book is so interesting that it's easy to forgive. If you live in a place with lots of light pollution (as I do), this will make you want to travel somewhere quiet and look up...continued
Full Review
(500 words)
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night
Mixing myth and history with the latest science, Eaves weaves her story with clear, insightful prose, offering an entertaining journey into the darkness that is so vital for life on earth and so easily forgotten. Nightfaring reminds us of all that being in the dark brings alive and allows, what we lose when we overuse artificial light, and the good wildness that makes the night so key to our wellbeing. Stephanie Vermillion, author of 100 Nights of a Lifetime
Nightfaring is an invitation to explore how the night sky connects us – to the past, to ourselves, to the planet and to the cosmos. Through rich storytelling and deeply reported histories, Megan leads us on a raw, multisensory journey into the less-trodden nocturnal world. This introspective read is a push to reimagine our relationship to the night...It's also a reminder that travel, when done well, can be life's greatest teacher.While Megan Eaves-Egenes travels the world in search of the night sky in Nightfaring, the encroaching threat of light pollution looms over the proceedings. It's hard for it not to: as she explains in the first chapter, the light from LEDs can travel "30 to 40 kilometers (about 20 to 25 miles)," while "the cumulative skyglow from a big city…can sometimes be seen 200 kilometers (125 miles) away." But when you're talking about something like an omnipresent skyglow, it can be useful to know exactly what it is you're dealing with. Luckily, we have the Bortle scale to help us determine precise levels of light pollution. Astronomers use the scale to measure sky brightness, set realistic expectations for what can be seen at a given site, and ...
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