Unseen Skies

If you have been following this column for a while, you know I love the very idea of “forthcoming books”; you may recall my account of learning, for the first time, that the reference section of the public library included a massive volume (or were there two volumes?) in which books due to be published in the coming year were listed in smallish print: so many books that simply turning the pages was intoxicating. And a bit later, when I began seeing Publishers Weekly regularly, there were the two massive issues each year, one for books forthcoming in the spring season, one for the fall.

Nowadays, what we might describe as “curated” lists of forthcoming books appear in great profusion. Some of these are personal (I always check out Phil Christman’s lists); many are “institutional,” from the New York Times Book Review, for instance. Even so, some of the magic remains, and I am alert to good news about a book coming, say, from a writer I admire who hasn’t been heard from for a while, or a book on a subject that I follow, or a book I’ve been impatiently waiting for. Just today, I was delighted to see Michael Connelly posting about a novel coming this spring, in which he will introduce a new protagonist. He is on my “always read” list.

That list is exceedingly various. It includes fiction writers and poets (Marly Youmans is both), historians, “critics,” philosophers, and more. It includes Craig Childs, whose Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America was my Book of the Year for 2018. In 2022, I devoted a column here to his book Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau. He has a new book coming out on May 25, The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light. I have in my hands an “uncorrected proof,” and I am too impatient to wait until it’s officially out to tell you about it. 

The Wild Dark is a “road” book: Childs makes a journey, on his bike, with a friend, Irvin. Each chapter begins with a “Bortle Number,” the significance of which Childs explains at the outset:

Bortle is a naked-eye scale for determining a night sky’s quality, first published in Sky and Telescope in 2001 by amateur astronomer John E. Bortle. His name sounds space-like, as if, like Jan Oort of the Oort Cloud, it were designed for astronomical prominence. Known for documenting and publishing new comet sightings, Mr. Bortle devised a simple scale from 1 to 9 based on what you can and cannot see: Mars, or the globular fuzz patches of faraway Messier objects, or Zodiacal lights.

Childs’s first chapter, following the introduction, is titled “Bortle 9,” and so on down to “Bortle 1,” when visibility is sharpest; it’s followed by an ironic coda of sorts, titled “Formula 1” (the significance of which will be clear when you read the book).

It’s hardly news, of course, that along with pollution of other kinds—in the air we breathe, in the water we drink—we are subject to light pollution. Now and then when I look at the night sky, standing outside our house in Wheaton, Illinois, I’m struck by how different it is from the night sky I saw as a boy. We didn’t live in a rural area—not at all—and yet the sky was so much more luminous, and numinous, than it is now. But important as this is, Childs’s subject is larger still. Without any huffing and puffing, he makes us realize that we are in grave danger of entirely forgetting the grand scheme of things in which we have our place.

Childs’s narrative is ruminative, associative, rich with sharply observed detail, best read a few pages at a time rather than in a rush. It is melancholy but also full of life. It is self-contained, not in a way that suggests disdain for his readers but also not seeking to “sell” us anything. His sense of our shared world is in some respects quite different from mine. In “Bortle 1,” he talks with a science writer, Amy Finkbeiner, “specializing in astronomy.” At one point, Finkbeiner says, “You know for the early Christians curiosity was a sin.” And Childs replies, with leaden irony, “There’s a whole universe that’s none of your business.” To which Finkbeiner, on cue, says, “But I want to know.”

Oh dear. Nevertheless, this Christian was very glad to have read The Wild Dark; you might be too.