The Light of Our Lives

This personal essay explores an overlooked aspect of life writing: light. I explore the different kinds of light in my own life and the life of my grandmother, who was born and raised on an island off the west coast of Ireland, and of my father who spent his summers there as a boy. The island had no electricity, which made the islanders more aware of the fading and return of the light and of its endless, local permutations. I draw on the work of painters and filmmakers who see light’s scarcity as part of the artform, and on life writing by Roland Barthes, John Boorman, John Berger, Elizabeth Bowen and others. What, I ask, does the long human quest for everlasting light mean in an era of light pollution and what Matthew Beaumont calls ‘post-circadian capitalism’? Our turbo capitalist world rests on the fantasy of endless growth, continual betterment, life without end. One task of life writing, in an age of climate emergency, might be to help us accept our own finitude—to concede that our lives are a waking dream, refracted through light.