Cuenca/Lauro

“According to some NASA research the artificial light pollution on earth grows by two per cent every year, our planet is getting constantly brighter and we risk that the light extinguishes the night.”

We live in a world that is constantly illuminated, our faces do not have shadows and day after day, hour after hour, we parade in the wake of led and displays, chasing the dreaded darkness away.

Radiant, shiny and bright are the favorite superlative and we see ourselves as the alleged children of the light, we are the fans of the 24h millenium, the triumph of the Sol Invictus and of the human predominance on nature. Nevertheless we are also a generation that gropes in the dark, a real paradox of contemporaneity. So where has the darkness gone?

We have relegated it to the long list of things we should avoid, preferring the more extrovert, festive and hyperactive brightness. It does not matter that in darkness we can see a star, that from darkness our universe exploded and that in darkness we may again find ourselves. Dark is sad, dark intimidates, dark does not produce; dark is negligible. Blinded by the atavistic fear of mystery and death we are not able to see how crucial darkness is to our survival. Darkness helps us to recollect, to distinguish, it gives us advises and rest; in darkness we can find each other, we can get together, we are wakeful, we tell tales and listen to the memories and spirits; the soul speaks finally to the man and reveals him the weight of what he said or did not say, of what he did or did not do. In darkness the remorse embraces the regret, the actions call for justice and we are asked to take stock; what has to stay remains and what has to go vanishes.

It does not matter if it is at the end of a day, in various phases of our life or in crucial moments of human history, darkness will always be the focal point of evolution, the transition moment in the perennial cycle of death and rebirth.

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