Sunday, April 16, 2006
Bleak, but real
On Friday it was still bleak house out in the countryside. Maybe Monday will be better. On the subject of bleakness, good lighting is incredibly important in a Latvian winter when the sun is only out for a few hours a day, and there are literally weeks between sunny days. Although a large proportion of Latvia's electricity is hydro-electric, the amount of power we use just on keeping our home lit has often bothered me. So I was particularly pleased to read this article, Natural light 'to reinvent bulbs', about 100% efficient lighting. Until I started reading it. "The new material can also be printed onto glass or plastic and so in theory could create large areas of lighting, relatively cheaply." This sounded eerily familiar, and several hours later I worked out where I had come across the idea before. "Bulkheads and ceilings were constructed of the new glowboy panelling, making the long room look as though it were carved in the interior of a glacier." The quote is from Ken Kesey's 'other' novel, Sailor Song (1992), a manic romp through Alaska in a near future approaching environmental apocalypse. The world that Kesey imagines is a deeply unpleasant place, and one of the things that makes it so unpleasant is the distance that technology puts between people and their surroundings. For a dental surgery, I can see that a fully lit, 100% efficient, daylight producing ceiling is a good thing. For our house? Well, I hope that if the choice becomes available I will choose the most efficient option. On the other hand, the failings in our artificial lighting are what make real daylight, when it finally reappears, so well worth waiting for - I would rather my artificial lights remain exactly that.
