Shadows Unlocking Their Secrets, from Plato to Our Time

I In the Beginning There Was Shadow The Earth was without form, and void; And darkness was on the face of the deep. Genesis 1:2 Darest thou, monster, Here beside beauty Under the eye of great Phoebus to show thee? Come, only step forth, notwithstanding, For the hideous sees he not, As his holy eye has not Yet alighted on shadow. Goethe, Faust A Very Relaxed Beginning The first time I watched a lunar eclipse carefully was shortly after midnight on April 4, 1996. If you ever find yourself observing such an eclipse, you should know that it's important to have a very comfortable chair. I'm no great fan of long sessions outdoors on humid country nights, and I probably would not have watched the eclipse if I hadn't had the option of doing it easily from my home in Paris. The moon was per- fectly framed in the window (at the time, I lived at the top of a skyscraper), and it shone magnificently, despite pollution from the light of the ville lumiere. I had thought that the interesting part of an eclipse would be the shadow of the earth slipping slowly across the moon, and the chance to look into the sky and see a shaft of black negative light. This expectation was indeed fulfilled: right on schedule, the earth's shadow cone dimmed and then completely extinguished the moonshine. But at that point, in the moment of total eclipse, I hadpardon the expressionan illumination. For the first time, I saw the moon for what it really was, and I wanted to put it down in words. The moon is a fairly large, shadowy rock hanging a certain distance over my head; oddly, it doesn't fall down and hit me. Naturally, I knew about the laws that kept it safely in orbit; but my eyes, unaccustomed to seeing stones hanging in the sky, didn't want to believe it. Likewise, it had escaped my notice that the moon wasas I knew perfectly wella huge dark rock; usually the diaphanous glow of the lunar surface tricks the eye with the illusion that it's a delicate, airy lantern. During an eclipse the moon loses its character as demigoddess: it splits off itself from the royal court of the other visible, shining celestial objects. Even those planets that are dark like the moon and glow with reflected light aren't seen as planets: our not very selective vision lumps them in together with the stars. Light offers the moon a weightlessness that renders it more acceptablemakes it seem almost normal that the moon should sail in the night like a paper lantern hung from the black ceiling of the sky. So the shadow of the earth reveals the true nature of the moon. Since that night I haven't stopped thinking about shadows. Up till then I had considered them to be an interesting example of a strange, not very clearly identified object, with some philosophical complexi- ties. (Strange objects are always thought-provoking for philosophers.) Beyond this narrow theoretical interest, shadows simply registered on me with the low, negative associations that our culture has (and many other cultures have) bound them up with: that shadows are for hiding in and plotting in; that shadows are dark and worrisome. All of a sudden, as I watched the eclipse drawing to a close, shadows seemed much more important and worthy of attention. If shadows can forever change the way we think about the moonexpelling it from the Olympus of the gods to imprison it in the world of minerals, in a spectacular comedown, the opposite of the ascent through the chain of beingthen shadows are valuable tools of knowledge. They don't hide: they reveal. In other words, too much light can be harmful. And yet some people can never get enough light, as we know from one of the most famous images in Western literature, descrCasati, Roberto is the author of 'Shadows Unlocking Their Secrets, from Plato to Our Time', published 2004 under ISBN 9780375707117 and ISBN 0375707115.