Losing power, and with it heat and the ability to cook, is a misery. The icy stillness of 3 a.m. becomes an oppression, almost frightening. Night is an enemy, and morning dramatically welcome. After just the first two nights of our recent post-freak snowstorm outage, I was more than ready to return to the comforts of the 21st century.
Still, in the absence of electric light, much of a different kind came to light. The deprivations and complications of everyday living are harder, but that difficulty soon becomes part of the routine. We are, after all, an extraordinarily adaptable species. As the difficulties are incorporated, it’s easier to take notice of things that were always there, but were drowned out in the glare we’ve surrounded ourselves with. It’s almost a vacation in the 19th century, complete with problems.
What, after all, do you do on a frigid New England night without a screen full of moving pictures to numb and narrow your focus to its glowing confines? What do you do without email to check, without recipes from Epicurious.com or status updates from other people’s distant lives? The Victorians, of course, had plenty of answers, especially in the entertainment department, from board games to conversation to music.
If, in 1870, you wanted to hear your favorite song, you had to find someone willing to play it for you, or learn an instrument and play it yourself. That’s why it’s so easy to find, in the dusty back corners of antique shops everywhere, reams of sheet music. Most everyone had an aunt who could, to some degree, replicate popular songs. Most everyone had a cousin who could warble along gamely. Polished musical accomplishment may not have been the order of the day, but the ability to entertain oneself was as necessary as a good pocket knife. As darkness fell and candles went on, I found myself eyeing my acoustic guitars with satisfaction. I was prepared, as a bandmate from an (all acoustic) old project said, for “life after the revolution.”
As fate would have it, you can witness a re-creation of the old-school parlor music approach this week in Brattleboro. The performance comes from a collection of songs from just after the Victorian era. As the press release explains, “Songs from the Hills of Vermont, published in 1919, is a set of 13 folks songs from Dover, Vermont collected by Edith Barnes Sturgis from the singing of James Atwood, his second wife, Mary, and an ‘intimate friend,’ Aunt Jenny Knapp.”
It goes on to say that the piano arrangements (by Robert Hughes) were designed for public and parlor performance. This Sunday’s performance won’t be in a parlor, but the current prevailing forecast of pre-electric conditions ought to work admirably in favor of creating an appropriate setting. Pianist Susan Dedell is joined by singers Tony Barrand and Keith Murphy for the 3 p.m. performance at the All Souls Church in West Brattleboro (for details, check the Brattleboro Music Center site).
Back in my own frozen house, I lugged up my acoustic guitar from the basement to fill the candlelit living room with sounds. The notes headed out into the dim light, and the jumping shadows seemed almost to move with the waves of sound.
Afterward I walked over to my neighbor’s house. It’s true that disasters, major or minor, often bring out the best in people. Neighbors who have, sometimes, barely spoken to each other find themselves enjoying a candlelit potluck. My own neighborhood has already become a particularly friendly one, and the latest adversity seems to be cementing that unusual neighborliness. Invitations to use the hot water for a shower or a gas stove to cook are surprisingly easy to come by.
It makes a weird sense: the isolation and need for joint effort that are quickly apparent in even a minor catastrophe create community, bring out generosity. It’s almost enough to make one hopeful about human nature. The good things that often follow catastrophe are the subject of a recent book by Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell. In short, the book discusses the claim that disasters tend to bring out the worst in the people who have the most to lose materially, and bring out the best in most everyone else. Even in the relatively minor problems after a Halloween snowstorm.
Solnit says, “The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning.” She continues, “&Power devolves to the people on the ground in many ways: it is the neighbors who are the first responders and who assemble the impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild.”
Now and then, I can see the Milky Way from my back yard. That night, even though it wasn’t a night of particularly good “seeing,” as the astronomers say, the stars shone with a cold, gorgeous clarity. The only light for miles was the ruddy underbelly of a single small cloud reflecting the shine of some far-off end of the world where the lights still worked. Jupiter shone with such conviction, I expected to see its moons. The Pleiades looked, for once, like the smudge of clotted stars that really do fill that region, though light pollution usually obscures them.
I still tend to prefer the bluster of contemporary, wired reality. All the same, it was a startling night: the clear sky seemed closer, more real.
