Night Vision
Also by Je A n s pr A ckl A nd
Tattoos for Mother’s Day
Hard Water
Tilt Strands
These Silent Mansions
Night Vision
In search of the true dark
J ONA THAN CA PE
LO NDO N
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First published by Jonathan Cape in 2025
Copyright © Jean Sprackland 2025
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For my children, made of darkness and light
Preface: Into the Dark
Darkness is hard to see. One starless night last winter I stood alone in the lane and thought about the spell it casts on a place, making it feel different not only to my eyes but to all my senses. I knew my surroundings well but I couldn’t see them at all; I couldn’t even see where I ended and they began. The air felt thicker than usual, and sound travelled mysteriously: the scratching of dry leaves could have been a shrew in the ditch beside me or a roe deer across the valley. The more I considered it, the more surprising it seemed that something so simple could have such a transformative effect. Come to think of it, I asked myself, what is darkness?
Surely the question was absurd. Darkness is the absence of light – the dictionary tells me this, and the nights in this place attest to the truth of it. But how can a mere absence have such a powerful impact on my body as I balance, orientate myself and move through space? How can it alter the way my mind works as I pick up atmosphere and perceive reality?
Darkness is hard to see for other reasons too. A cloak of metaphor is thrown over it, disguising its true identity. Even as I experience it firsthand – stumbling from bed in the small hours, or going down the steps into a cellar, fumbling for the light switch – it can slip into invisibility, leaving behind an image, a symbol. The pleasures of the dark – a clear night
sky, a gathering of friends around a bonfire, a space for creative thought, intimacy or rest – leave hardly a trace in the language. Most of the time it’s taken as a way of articulating a range of abstract states and conditions, all of them negative: death, oblivion, ignorance, depression, satanism and the occult, war, sin and so on. Darkness is not any of these things, but it becomes a proxy for them.
If you type the word into a search engine, you will trawl up an enormous seething net of results like these. It goes on for hundreds, thousands of pages. The gloom is pierced by occasional shafts of light. Mind-blowing articles about dark matter, dark energy and the dark side of the moon (none of which is actually dark). The fact that an Old English word for darkness, heolstor, also meant ‘hiding place’ and eventually became ‘holster’; and that the darkest material in the world is called Vantablack, which in the form of sprayable paint is exclusively licensed to the artist Anish Kapoor. But the rest is desolation, real and imaginary. As you scroll and scroll, you might think of something the poet Kathleen Jamie wrote: ‘Pity the dark: we’re so concerned to overcome and banish it, it’s crammed full of all that’s devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair.’
There’s no ignoring the bad in the world, no way of avoiding it. We live in a time of manifold crisis, and each unfolding threat, loss and suffering is reflected and refracted down an endless digital hall of mirrors, twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes despair seems the only possible response. Of course, none of it is the fault of the dark, but as poets know well, metaphor exerts a mighty influence on thought and feeling; the duality of ‘light good, darkness bad’ is so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness it has come to seem like an essential truth, and plays a part in
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shaping our attitudes towards the real thing. No wonder we keep turning on more lights.
The truth is that darkness is a necessary condition for life on earth, and at this time it is imperilled and in need of protection. The nocturnal world teems with organisms that hunt, feed and reproduce only in the dark. And when I walk through city streets under a glowing sky, I’m conscious that I need it too. Yes, I love light and colour, long summer evenings and dazzling winter sunshine, but darkness offers gifts of its own. Can the real thing be prised free of its negative associations, which are as old as human thought itself?
A few years ago, we bought an isolated cottage in the Blackdown Hills, close to the border between Somerset and Devon. In this small valley, life flows at a slower pace and the nights can be long and vertiginously deep. We have no internet connection or mobile signal to mediate between us and our surroundings. I spend a lot of time outdoors, where I watch the sky, noticing the shift and interplay of light and dark, how different everything looks and feels after dusk. These dark nights are an unanticipated gift of the place. I want to immerse myself, to delight in them, to feel at home in them. But I often find myself holding back. Some part of me remains alert and vigilant, scanning my surroundings, ears pricked for unfamiliar sounds. I love the dark, but it can be so deep I’m afraid of toppling in and never being able to climb out again.
There is darkness in urban environments too, but no risk of toppling in. Cities are heady and glittering places – it’s part of their attraction. But you can end up feeling trapped and hemmed in by light, glaring from streetlamps and buildings, shop windows and billboards, spilling upwards and drowning the stars. It’s almost possible to forget that anything exists
beyond the smoky orange glow of the sky; the city comes to feel like the universe. It’s a twenty-first century reversion to the geocentric model, with us at the centre of everything and darkness nothing more than our own shadow.
We humans have a complex and contradictory relationship with darkness. We have always feared it, and made great efforts to mitigate it, even to blot it out, bringing our technologies and ingenuity to bear on the challenge. At the same time – especially for the city dweller who remembers the less polluted skies of their childhood – the truly dark sky can represent a kind of lost innocence, closeness to nature and a state of belonging in time and space. Travelling to some remote spot offers an opportunity to regain that state, at least temporarily. To stargaze, and to observe the rich nocturnal life that prevails beyond the range of streetlamps. To sit at the mouth of a tent and listen to the sounds of the night – owls calling, branches in the wind, unknown creatures barking and rustling – without access to the usual visual cues. To feel the landscape re-enchanted, and the self with it. Dark sky tourism is booming. But not everyone can get away to such places, and for some people the sight of an unspoilt sky is a distant memory, while others have never experienced it at all. Darkness, once a birthright, is becoming a commodity.
On the train from London or Manchester, I imagine a conversation between city and country. Nothing stays the same for long, says the first. Some things are eternal, says the second. The dark is one of the eternal things. It alters my sense of space in a contradictory way, confronting me with incalculable distance while bringing me into closer relationship with my environment and the life that surrounds me. As I come down the lane I realise with a jolt of the heart: I’m here! The feeling of awe
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cuts straight through to somewhere cramped and depleted inside me, reopening a space for awareness of self. It reminds me that I am not a bundle of functions, anxieties and to-do lists, not a device plugged in to a giant computer, but a body in space: entire, flawed, mortal, one among an infinite variety of living things, all of us here together – afloat or shipwrecked – in this one miraculous moment.
All this comes from an absence of light. Standing there that still January night, I thought not only about darkness but also about silence, which of course the dictionary defines as the absence of sound. It occurred to me that they are similar, these two great absences, both of which feel like actual states, like huge rooms furnished with sensation. I thought of John Cage’s famous composition 4’33”, in which the orchestra assembles but never plays a note. Every time it’s performed, the piece demonstrates that true silence does not exist. The ‘music’ the audience hear as they sit together in the concert hall is incidental: a distant siren, a cough, a floorboard creaking and settling, a gurgle of digestion, the in and out of their own breathing. It struck me that the same logic applies to darkness: that what we call absence is really just less. After all, the lane was getting a little less dark as I stood there and my eyes gradually adjusted. The orchestra of moon and torch had not played a note, but now I could see my own gloved hand, the hedge, the footpath sign. What’s more, it’s relative; my night vision is very limited compared with that of an owl or a tiger, and for the giant ostracod, which has parabolic mirrors for eyes, even the impenetrable dark of the deep ocean is not total.
Darkness is a human construct, subjective and partial. It’s possible to love it and fear it at the same time. It complicates our knowledge of the world, introducing ambiguity, softening
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hard edges with uncertainty. We think we know it well, and much of the time it goes unnoticed: too commonplace, too obvious to be worth considering. What can there possibly be to say about it? I tried to puzzle it out, while the clouds slid over the stars and my own white breath drifted and dispersed. A cloak of metaphor concealing an absence that isn’t really an absence – nothing could be more slippery and elusive.
On that winter night I decided to go in search of the true dark, in which we all once belonged, before we were dispossessed. So this is a book about actual rather than figurative darkness: how it affects us and why it matters; about some of the ways in which it has been explored and interpreted; and what it has meant to me in different places and different states, in childhood and adolescence, in childbirth and illness, love and grief. About the role it plays in adventure: not territorial conquest and the planting of flags, but the unpredictable, messy exploits of people who set off to explore the dark of the high Arctic or the deep cave, and discover truths about themselves in the process. And my own modest versions, much smaller in scale and closer to home: adventures anyone could have if they wanted, because darkness can make the most ordinary activity feel adventurous, touching familiar places and things with strangeness, answering each question with another question.
These small but necessary adventures begin with opening a door and stepping through it. You can’t see a thing: you could be anywhere. The door might open outwards onto a city street or a country lane; or inwards on a house, a hut, a dream. Any place will do. Step over the threshold, into the dark, and feel your way.
Darkling
You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘You Darkness’
Cottage
At seven on the morning of the winter solstice, it’s still night. By seven- thirty, there is the faintest pallor on the horizon where the field rises to the east. The trees are restless, as if sensing the balance is tipping on the fulcrum. The weeping beech in front of the house stirs as if the darkness itself is moving it. A wavering light travels between the trees at the end of the orchard: a torch being carried along the garden of our neighbours’ cottage at the bottom of the lane, no doubt by one of the girls collecting eggs for breakfast.
I can’t imagine being afraid of the dark in the mornings. At the onset of a winter night it stretches and lengthens ahead, as if daylight has been cancelled out. It can raise the old fear of cosmic abandonment, set out so graphically by Byron in his poem ‘Darkness’:
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air
But now, with that barely perceptible glimmer in the east, such apocalyptic thoughts would seem far-fetched. And getting up on these dark mornings offers a simple gift: the opportunity to watch it get light. The transition is more than merely beautiful; it’s a profound and affirmative thing to witness.
I have always loved winter: the shortness of the days, the sense of drawing inwards, of gathering. As a child I needed that season of retreat and interiority, and the permission it granted to stay indoors and read. In my adult life I have noticed that my sense of creative openness or porousness is at its most intense in October and November, as the nights lengthen. But I know that for some people, it’s a depressing and difficult time which they endure rather than enjoy. Who knows why we all perceive it so differently. One friend welcomes it as a reminder of her own fearlessness, learnt in childhood when she went alone across a farmyard at night to tend to the animals. But another tells me that the dark of winter robs the world of colour, and that seeing colour is crucial to her happiness and wellbeing, and a third says vehemently that he hates the dark because to him it means just one thing: death.
Many dark metaphors have a sense of finality about them. When Vladimir Nabokov wrote that life is ‘a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’, he was drawing on two of the great symbols at once: darkness as oblivion, and darkness as ignorance. I cannot remember the time before I was born, nor can I know what it will be like to be dead. Earthly consciousness is richly multisensory, but the extinction of that consciousness is almost always imagined in terms of vision. The dread is of endless darkness from which there can be no escape.
In life, however, dark is always followed by light, and light by dark. The reality of my lived experience is change, not stasis. Regular patterns – day and night, the seasons, migrations and cycles of life – are what anchor me to this world; fear of their breakdown is voiced everywhere, and not only in our own time.
But look – a thrush – or is it a blackbird? My first bird of the day, dimly visible against a background of grass that is now faintly green.
In this place, the passage of time can feel slippery and equivocal, like the ground beneath our feet. We live on the springline, the point at which permeable greensand and impermeable clay subsoils meet, squeezing water out sideways, where it wells up as springs, and forms mire and quaking bog. The land here is too wet to grow crops. A few cattle, or a few sheep, that’s about it. Some vegetables, an apple tree or two. These basic conditions remain unaltered to this day. Houses are few, and it’s not always easy to sell them.
The clock has ticked on, however, and life in the valley has changed, not least at night. Previous occupants of this place knew its darkness far more intimately than I do. Electricity was not installed until the 1960s; before that, the cottage was fitted with oil and then paraffin lamps, but throughout most of its history it was lit by ‘rats’ tails’, homemade lamps made from rushes dipped in tallow. The children would be sent out to gather the rushes, which grow abundantly in the wet and boggy ground, and they were soaked and stripped and spread out to dry on the hearth before being cut into lengths ready for use. The tallow was a by-product of the raising of sheep and cattle for food: animal fat, carefully saved and eked out, pressed into little dishes made of clay or stone. Those early occupants made do with very little, and that simple wick in a saucer of fat was not very different from the kind of lamp in use three thousand years earlier. Just as well they had easy access to the raw materials, since the cost of readymade candles would certainly have been beyond their means. For most of human history, lighting depended on fuel
derived from edible sources – fish oil, whale oil, tallow, vegetable oils such as coconut, olive and castor – and there was a tension between the need to eat and the need for illumination. Before industrialisation, the local ecology determined the availability of fuel, and the people who had the readiest access to light lived not in cities but in places where there was an abundance of cattle, sheep or oily fish.
The people living in this valley were very poor, but some animal fat could usually be spared for the making of lamps. In times of shortage, however, food came first and homes were left in the dark. The introduction of inedible fuels was revolutionary. The breakthrough came in the nineteenth century: first oil of turpentine, which had the disadvantage of being highly explosive, and then paraffin, a more stable alternative. Crucially, it was not edible. The competition between lighting and food began to subside.
The first time we saw this place, we came by train and took a taxi from the nearest town. The driver, navigating the steep, narrow, twisting lane into the valley, was appalled. ‘No one lives here,’ he told us, firmly and repeatedly. It was a bleak February day, and the estate agent, impractically dressed, bouncing on his heels to keep warm, could hardly believe his luck; the place had been on and off the market for years, the owners long gone, and it was looking like a hopeless case.
We pushed the gate and it dropped from its hinges. We stood and stared. The cottage, long ago rendered and roofed with tiles, was ensnared in a thicket of brambles as stout as rusted railings. Sleet ran straight off the roof and pooled on the broken concrete. Electricity wires trailed on the ground between the house and some kind of outbuilding. ‘No,’ I said, but I spoke with the desperation of a lover already caught in
the trap. No. In the lane behind me, the taxi driver was still attempting to turn round, clutch burning, wheels spinning uselessly in the mud.
We liked the feeling of remoteness, the hills, the quiet. We knew we had a lot to learn about living in such a wild and wet bit of country. But we didn’t think at all about the nights until a few months later, when the deal was signed and sealed and we came with sleeping bags and camped out in the empty house. We had no curtains yet, and when I woke in the night the square of the window frame held so many stars I thought I must be dreaming.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, who devotes no more than a page and a half of her book Somerset to the Blackdown Hills, nevertheless captures them well. ‘Lanes in every degree of greenness and forsaken windingness branch off the roads,’ she writes, ‘lanes which are rutted with cart tracks, or closed off by sagging gates, lanes whose thick hedges grow out of stony banks, lanes that disappear downhill under green tunnels. If you follow them they will entangle you in further lanes, or take you, with an artful circumvention of contours, to some farmhouse perched halfway down a hillside, with a climbing field behind it dotted with sheep.’ She was writing in 1949, but her description is as accurate now as then. The ‘forsaken windingness’ has so far proved an insurmountable obstacle to the provision of broadband; a few years ago there was talk of it, and a contractor came and painted cryptic symbols at intervals on the roads, but shortly afterwards it was pronounced impossible. A few of the symbols survive, faded to the point of archaeology.
To begin with, this cottage was two tiny dwellings, built on a field to house farm labourers and their families. The men themselves built their homes, using whatever they could
find in the fields they tended: chert and rubble for the walls, straw to thatch the roof. It was heavy work. An agricultural gazette remarked of local conditions at the time: ‘Little can be said that is favourable. The land is in the hands of men of no capital, who employ hardly any labour.’ Scraping a living on the springline was always tough, but the wider economics of agriculture varied over the years and perhaps it was during an upturn, on a spike of optimism, that the decision was made to build.
Each of the two dwellings was dominated by a stone inglenook in which a fire was kept burning. That domestic fire was vital for warmth, cooking and illumination, and at night it was all that stood between those families and the blinding darkness outside their doors. It was kindled with dry bracken and fuelled by wood, gathered where it fell from the trees or harvested through pruning and coppicing. If there was a shortage of firewood, it was supplemented with furze or gorse. The gorse must have been awkward and scratchy to harvest, and once it was gathered into faggots or ‘blackjacks’ it had to be left for six months before it was ready to burn. It still grows profusely in the nearby fields, putting forth its chromium yellow flowers and warm coconut smell, but no one harvests it now. Bracken, too, flourishes, dies back and goes to waste, though it was for centuries considered an important crop, providing bedding for animals as well as kindling for the fire.
I don’t suppose Sylvia Townsend Warner hung around here after dusk. When she noticed the dark creeping up one of those green tunnels towards her, she’ll have jumped in her MG, back to the lights of town and a gin in the hotel bar. Who could blame her? In any case, there’s plenty of darkness to be found in this landscape, even by day. It’s held in the steepness and narrowness of the valleys, the sunken lanes and
thick hedges, the black mire of the springline and the old turbaries where people used to dig peat for their fires. It settles in the ancient woods, in the dense shade of oak and beech, until a storm uproots a few trees and sunshine pools on the ground where a space has opened up in the canopy. Wherever a patch of the woodland floor is exposed to the sky, there is a sudden bloom as long-dormant plants take advantage of the light. But elsewhere the woods keep their shadows, along with the ruins of abandoned settlements – Quants, Hawks Moor, Jacob’s City – unknown to the intrepid walker until they trip on a piece of masonry in the undergrowth. The landscape has changed slowly here, and the past is always there at the edge of the vision.
The dark nights feel to me like a privilege, but I’m sure they had a different character for the families who congregated here in the winter. Census returns show that at times there were eight or nine people living in each of the adjoining cottages, and the downstairs room with its inglenook would have been very crowded. Local records tell of births and deaths within these walls; sex out of wedlock and with the wrong brother, a ghastly accident, a man in uniform walking away up the lane to war. Sometimes on windy nights I think I hear voices in the chimney, but I can’t tell what they’re saying. I unlatch the little iron door and put my hand into the old bread oven, feeling around in the dust for something left behind. There are strange marks scratched into the stone over the inglenook, but who knows what to read into them?
On midwinter nights, I think of the young daughters of the family. Girls hereabouts contributed to the family subsistence by doing piecework sewing gloves. They began to learn the trade at the age of seven; it was very fine work that required young eyes, and much of it was done by firelight
and rushlight. A local clergyman warned: ‘It makes them bad wives, for it is a kind of sewing useless for needlework or repairing clothes.’ But where money was scarce every pair of gloves mattered. Two dozen pairs a week would bring in four shillings, making an important contribution to overall income.
They, too, are right at the edge of the vision, those longgone girls. If I keep very still, they might come into focus, sitting bent over their work, making gloves they can never hope to wear themselves. They chatter and giggle as they poke rows of holes in the lambskin with a little awl, and make their neat stitches with a special three-cornered needle, all by the sooty light of a rat’s tail.
Library
Many years ago, I went on a long retreat in a big old house in Scotland, a whole month with nothing to do but write. I had a contract for a book of poems, and I needed to make progress. My children had come to the station to see me off. They roller-skated up and down the platform, and I leant out of the train window and watched them.
The taxi pulled up on the sweep. It was late November, a lashing wet night. I rubbed the car window with my sleeve and saw a door open in the wall and yellow light spill out onto the gravel.
The house creaked and smelled of polish and roasting meat. Its halls and passages were glowing and shadowy. We trod them softly, not to disturb each other’s work.
The glen was narrow and deep, and dusk came at three in the afternoon. I would put on my boots and walk up and down, up and down. The water carried grey pages that had escaped from the paper mill upriver. They would catch on low branches and hang there, still harried by the rushing water. In my dreams they were poems torn off and swept along, speared on branches, always just out of reach. I did try scrambling down the bank to rescue one, but it was so steep and slippery I was afraid for my life.
Indoors, I sat idle at a black window until I couldn’t bear my own reflection any more. My room was panelled with oak
and a fire smoked in the grate. There was a huge four-poster bed with wine-red drapes. All day I sat at the table under the window and nothing happened. I had sharp pencils, the kind I liked, and a new notebook. I got up and paced the room. Nothing. Back to the window. Nothing. I put my head on the table and wept with fury. I did not want to be there, I could not write any poems, I hated poems, I could not do it.
When it became impossible to sit there any longer, I took a torch and crossed a courtyard to the tiny library. It was icy cold inside. I fumbled for the switch. The room was crepuscular, mostly populated by shadow and my own white breath. I reached at random for a book. I told myself I didn’t care what it was at all. It was economic theory. I put it back. Now I pushed the little ladder on its wheels and climbed it, reaching into the gloom and feeling with my fingertips for something to save me. I touched the spines of the books, and the shelf gritty with dust that was not really dust but disintegrating paper and glue and bits of insect wing. I prised out a book and climbed down with it. I flicked the switch and left the library to its winter dreaming. I was right the first time, any book would have done – even the economic theory. All I needed was to go into the dark and bring something back. But what I had in my hands now was an illustrated book of saints. In my smoky room I turned a page and there she was, unmistakable – the woman I had half seen, half imagined the day before, at the river’s edge, squeezing water from an infant’s garment and shaking it out. I had seemed to catch her eye, and she had stepped back barefoot over the mud and into the mouth of the cave and was gone. I reached for my notebook.
I still have in my possession a copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets with the school library label posted inside the front
cover. There’s a list of pupils’ names and the dates on which it was issued. I have written my name in my best handwriting, and looking at it now I remember the ink pen I had at that time, a birthday present from my grandparents. This might have been the first time I’d used it. My writing is careful, self-consciously neat but with a couple of little flourishes – the wavy line over the J, the extravagant loop of the y in my surname. It’s the start of a new school year, and this is the style I’ve decided to adopt. I remember the bottle of blue Quink I used to carry around in my school bag, the ritual of filling the pen by prising up the silver lever on the side and letting it drink it in.
As a librarian’s daughter I feel a bit ashamed about my failure to return this book (and several others). It occurs to me that I still could, though the school has a different name now and times have changed, and it seems unlikely that they still study Four Quartets. In any case, I could never go back to that place. And I can’t part with it now, mainly because it’s so entertaining to read my annotations, in which I earnestly point out the literary devices and underlying meanings of the text. The most amusing – the one I’m looking at now – is on page 27, next to the opening lines of part three of ‘East Coker’:
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark
In the margin I have written, not in my blue Quink but with a well-sharpened 2D Staedtler pencil, the single word ‘Death’.