The Collapse XXVIII: Silence And Darkness

30 August 20XX

My Dear Lucilius:

I am sorry I have not penned you a few notes in almost a week; a combination of both much to do and little to write about.

I believe (by my running count) it has now been 5 days consecutively that I have seen no traffic at all – none. Not a car, a truck, a motorcycle, even one of those four wheel contraptions (I can never remember what they are called) which passes for a safer version of a motorcycle.

The Valley has gone incredibly quiet.

Oh, one can still hear noises, of course: occasional gas or electric powered motors for mowers or weed-eaters (although those have diminished as well), dogs barking, once or twice a child’s laughter. But that has really become the exception. My days are now filled with a vast lack of noise, so quiet I can hear the cowbells a mile away or the crack of deer through the dry grass as they come up for the evening.

I have taken to sitting out in the evenings after dusk (mosquito spray – such a useful thing. How I am going to miss it). We still have power of course, so I can at least write these to you, so there is still the hodge podge of lights at night which form our little settlement, but somehow everything seems dimmer and less bright. Lights are going off earlier in the evening for sure, either from a fear the electric bill will eventually come due or a reality check that soon enough, light will be much more limited.

It is odd, Lucilius, that we have come to believe that light represents civilization. In some ways, I suppose that is true: outside of accidental fires, only man makes fire and the output of fire, light. So many of our activities – most of them in fact – rely in some fashion on light. Without manufactured light (like electricity) or stored light (like candles and fire) our range of motion in the larger world truly becomes limited to daylight hours, and even the best of those being daylight hours with sun ( a challenge someplace like here, where at best we get eight solid hours of daylight in Winter and much of that overcast.) To me, at least, light – more than any other aspect – is a sign of civilization.

And so I sit here in my chair at night, with most of the lights going out far earlier, leaving only the moon and the stars to shine as brightly as they ever did before we started lighting up the sky to the point that we could not really see them.

It is not that the dark depresses me, Lucilius. It is the fact that I can feel a larger darkness settling over everything like a thick blanket.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca