“”
Light shines on every part of the neotechnic world: it filters through solid objects, it penetrates fog, it glances back from the polished surfaces of mirrors and electrodes. And with light, color comes back as the shape of things, once hidden in fog and smoke, becomes sharp as crystal. (Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. p.245)

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but- what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, as a child, in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon… (Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. p.7)

Cold and steady, electric light lacked the allure of the flame. It was not mesmerizing or soothing but strictly functional. I turned light into an industrial commodity. A German diarist in 1944, forced to use candles instead of lightbulbs during nightly air raids, was struck by the difference. “We have noticed,” he wrote, “in the ‘weaker’ light of the candle, objects have a different, a much more marked profile– it gives them a quality of ‘reality’” This quality he continued, “is lost in electric light: objects (seemingly) appear much more clearly, but in reality it flattens them. Electric light imparts too much brightness and thus things lose body, outline, substance- in short, their essence.” (Carr, Nicholas. The Big Switch. p.232)