Unenlightened

I arrived on campus this morning to find my classroom in the dark. The rest of the building had plenty of light, and the computer and projector in the classroom worked just fine, but that one room remained unillumined. The class that meets before mine was taking an exam today, so the prof had to scramble to find a clean, well-lighted place. Good thing my class was scheduled to visit Special Collections!

Do I really need light in a literature class? I could lead a class discussion in the dark, but how would students take notes? They would have to brush up their memorization skills, I suppose, or we could recreate the ambiance of an earlier time by gathering 'round a flickering candle or a whale-oil lamp, if we could find a supply of whale-oil, which is highly unlikely.

Candles might have been appropriate today. My students have been reading Kate Chopin and Stephen Crane's stories about children, so we went down to Special Collections to examine nineteenth-century children's books and magazines. It's very enlightening to read Stephen Crane's charming short story "The Angel Child" alongside illustrations of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Gaslight would be great! But of course we can't use gaslight or candles or whale-oil lamps in the library, especially in Special Collections. We could discuss literature in the dark by relying on as much of the text as we have stored in memory, but to handle the book, read the text, examine the illustrations, we need light.

And then there was light! Snuff the candles: we have illumination!