The Night Fear

After I watch the movie The City Dark, I was thinking a lot about why we show fear for the night. Some ideas come to me as I try to figure out the answer to such a question. Roger Ekrich, Virginia Tech historian, says, “The early impetus, as recently as three (or) four hundred years ago, for public lighting was crime. Virtually every ancient civilization that has left clues or some sort, stone tablets or works of history, every civilization had a fear of the night” (qtd. In City Dark). It means that our ancestors through time have shown fear for the night, and it could be because they felt unprotected and threatened by savage animals. For example, during prehistoric times, men had to fight in order to stay alive. When they discovered fire, that became their first source of light in the dark, they noticed that they could see everything around them, and it was an advantage because they could warn animals that threatened them away. They discovered that many animals showed fear of fire or the light that the fire produced, so they used it as a protection tool. Also, they discovered that the fire produced heat that they needed for surviving in extreme cold weather and to finally cook their food. This discovery was useful because the light helped them feel strong and protected.

Now we continue showing such fear for the dark because we, like ancient men, still associate bad things with the night. For example, many criminals take advantage of the night to commit crimes because they can hide in the dark and nobody can identify them while they steal cars or assault a store. Illicit activities such as drugs, prostitution, and violence usually happen at night because the streets are alone and the majority of people are sleeping at that time except criminals.

People increases their fear of the dark when they make up all kind of horror stories about dark creatures that come alive during night, such as vampires that sleep in the day and wake up at night to kill people, stories about haunted houses that come alive during the night, and the dead coming out of their graves or zombies that eat and scare people.

I think that our society has passed on this fear, generation through generation, but we can have many good things happen in the dark. We need to see the night differently in order to stop perpetuating this fear of the dark. For instance, we can go on a date with our loved one under the moonlight. We do not have to pay anything for a nice night outing like this, or we could use candles for lighting at night instead of electricity, because it looks magical and anyone can enjoy it. We can also learn to appreciate nature and its power because the stars are magical and can bring two people together at night. If we gaze at the night sky for a long time, we experience peace, strength, and eagerness to move on because the night sky inspires us due to its incredible stars, constellations, and the moon.

Glancing at the sky is for me the hope for a better life, a relationship with God. I know that he is in a place that I have not seen, but I know for sure that he exists because nobody else could create something as perfect and as immense as the universe. 

A Great Loss

When I watched the movie The City Dark, I was in shock because this movie presents a reality that we are living now, and nobody seems to notice. We are adjusting to live our life without thinking about anyone else due to our selfishness. We are losing some species and the night sky, and those are very important parts of our universe.

The lights of the city and the pollution have played a major role in the extinction of many species. Those animals, as shown in the movie, have been dying every day due to confusion. For example, when the turtles hatch and see the city lights, they believe that the light is the light reflected in the water by the moon, and instead of going to the sea, they go the wrong way. Eventually, many of those animals die. Even though many people are trying to protect them by guiding them to the sea, their effort is not enough because many places do not have such protection and without it, the innocent animals are misguided and hopeless.

Every inhabitant of the earth should have the same rights to live here. We were created to share this place with the animals too, but we have forgotten that because we think that we are almighty, and we can do anything that we want to do here. We believe that we have the right to think and decide for others because animals cannot talk or think for themselves in such matters. Most of the time we do not consider them or if they will benefit from our decisions; we are failing in protect them and their habitats. We fail to consider these species as important as they really are or that we are all on the same planet, and that we all belong to, not only to the world, but to this immense universe.

If we continue acting in the same way, in a few years many of those animals will be extinct, and they will be part of ancient history like the way dinosaurs are. If our cities continue growing and creating more lights that affect those animals, they will continue this pattern and probably the future generations will see or know about those animals that once existed only through books. Now is the time to be aware and try to find a solution to this problem that is threatening these worthy creatures. We only think about how to make money, create the best buildings, and have the latest in technology, but we never think in creating a better world for all of the earth’s inhabitants, including its animals.

We are losing the night sky and its beauty because we are replacing it with city lights. When we see the city sky, we find a place without stars or the moonlight. We also seem to not notice that, and we do not pay any special attention to it. If we keep doing what we have done so far, maybe we will not be able to see the moonlight or the stars in the future, and it would be catastrophic for all human beings.        

Amazing Night Sky

I remember when I was a child that my father shared stories about the sky. Those fascinating stories were made up by my dad, but I believed everything he said. He said that the sky was a big animal that ate all the earth’s animals, and those animals became the stars. My dad told my sister and I to gaze at the sky, in order to try to figure out what animals’ shapes we could see in them. We thought that we could recognize most of those animals. For example, we saw rabbits, horses, lions, birds, elephants, dogs, cats and scorpions. Sometimes we argued about what their shapes were because my sister thought she saw one animal and I saw a different one in the same area, so we had to look at other things to decide what kind of animal it was. To do so, we had to find some features that made it a specific animal. For example, if it was an elephant, it must have had big ears and a long trunk. If we agreed, we ended the discussion. Then, we would name and adopt them as our imaginary pets.

Another thing we did was count the stars. When we saw big stars, we showed them to our dad, and the person who found the most of those big stars, was the winner. Even though there were a lot of stars, we never could finish counting all of them. I would be there for hours and hours looking the night sky because I enjoyed the shiny and bright stars and the moon that illuminated the night. The moon, in my child fantasies, was a cradle that rocked a child when he wanted to sleep, and I wanted the moon to rock me to sleep as well. When there was a full moon, I wanted to sleep in the backyard because it was beautiful, I did not need electricity to see all around, and I felt protected under the moonlight.

When I was a teenager, I associated the night sky with love. I liked to see my boyfriend at night because it was romantic to meet under the moonlight and stars. Everything was beautiful, and I felt more in love under the majestic moon. When I fought with my boyfriend, I cried and talked to the stars about my problems and fantasies as if they could hear me. Sometimes I wished on shooting stars for love, and I believed that my love conflicts could be solved by them. There is something magical about them because after doing so I felt better and in peace.

I do not know when I stopped watching the sky and its beauty. It is as if something happened in my life that made me forget it. One possible reason for that is that I am more interested in technology than in appreciating the beauty of a full moon or a full star night sky. I prefer to be at home watching television or in front of a computer. Unfortunately, I am teaching my children to do the same thing that I do instead of giving them examples of appreciating the night sky as my father did with me.

Cake and Coffee

When I read 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day by Billy Collins, some poems captured my attention. I did not know why I liked them, but when I continued reading, I found the reasons why I liked them, they are about love relationships that ended in separation. The poems “Ever After” by Joyce Sutphen is about a person that believed she was going to be in a love story that ends up in a divorce. The poem “Please Come Late” by Hugo Williams is about a man who suffers because of his broken relationship. Both poems are apparently different, but they have many similarities.

The first similarity is that both narrators still love their ex-lovers. In “Ever After” the narrator talks about her ex-husband in a sad tone. She questions how their relationship will be after their separate lives now. The narrator states, “Who are we to each other now that / there is no us…” (Sutphen 3-4). It means that she nostalgically thinks about him and the life that they shared, she deeply wishes to be with him, but she knows that it is almost impossible because many bad things happened during her marriage, and those things caused their separation. Additionally, she does not say anything bad about him. When a relationship ends, people regret having married or having been with this person, or speak ill of the other person, but in this case she does not have anything bad to say about him. She knows that they will not be together anymore, and it makes her sad.

Equally in “Please Come Late” the narrator continues loving his ex. The narrator sees her in every face that passes by. He says “glancing round the room, / thinking everyone is you” (Williams 3-4). The narrator is thinking in her all the time. He also states “Don’t come anywhere near me / until I have gone slightly mad for love of you” (29-30). The readers infer that even though he says that he does not want to see her again, he is still madly in love with her, and he would like to be with her again.

The second similarity is that both have broken relationships. The speaker of “Ever After” is suffering due to a divorce. She says “now that / there is no us…” (3-4), she feels unhappy because her life has to change a lot after her divorce. The narrator states “as when we once posed (so young and helpless)…” (11). She feels unprotected without him because they lived together a long time. She has a flashback of the time when they got married, full of love and dreams, but now they have taken different ways. It is hard when you have a life with a person that you think is your loved one, but suddenly something happens that changes all your life.

Similarly in “Please Come Late” the narrator is living the same situation. He is separated from his loved one. The speaker is “wondering what you are doing / on the other side of town”… (11-12), the narrator does not know where she is because they apparently had a fight, and they have not seen each other for a while, so he imagines many things. He imagines that she is possibly with someone else; this situation makes him feel jealous and depressed.

The last similarity is that both narrators remember their relationship using symbols. In “Ever After,” the narrator remembers her wedding and “the tall white cake” as symbols of love (13). The white cake represents the moment when she got married full of love and happiness, but then, she mentions “with our hands (yours, mine) clasped on the knife / that was sinking into the tall white cake” (12-13). This symbolized their eventual separation, so as the knife cut deeper, their relationship kept having problems, each layer of the cake until the knife finally hit the bottom.

Correspondingly, in “Please Come Late,” the narrator mentions “I’m on my second coffee by now, eating the little bits of sugar in my cup (18-19). This cup empty of sugar is symbolic of his love and how he feels; empty without love which does not have any chance of refill.

In fact, both poems “Ever After” and “Please Come Late” are similar in many ways because both are about broken relationships that have made the narrators suffer. They are also experiencing feelings of sadness and unhappiness because their love stories do not have their happily ever after they expected.