The darkness Clark Strand is talking about here is literal: the darkness of the nighttime, of a world before electricity, when there was a rhythm to life that followed the sun’s rising and setting.
It’s so easy to take for granted. I expect even our grandparents (or great-grandparents, or great-great grandparents, depending on your age) who once knew a time before electricity, so quickly became accustomed to it as to dismiss to memory all that came before. I know my grandparents, who were born into rural mountain homes without electricity, sure enjoyed its luxury. How easy it is to forget that humankind has lived most of its collective history without it, with only lanterns, candles, the inconstant moon and distant starlight to illuminate their nights, to relieve the darkness.
Have we lost something, now that power lines are strung everywhere and there is never true darkness, unless we choose it, and even then the return of the light is only the flipping of a switch away, as close as the lamp on our bedside table? In this age of 24-hour superstores and streetlights running parallel to even back-country roadways? Author Clark Strand believes we have. I believe it, too. I believe in a different kind of loss. Might we not, in some subtle, simple way, NEED to feel afraid of the dark—and the things that might be lurking therein? Doesn’t such unrelieved darkness satisfy something primitive in the human soul?