Perhaps it does, to a degree, though the apparent belief that security is directly proportional to lumens seems pretty dubious. And we still don’t seem to feel any safer. Does all that unnatural light help us look one another in the eye more readily, trust our neighbors more, greet the strangers we can see so clearly? Not that I can tell.

When I bought my house in this small town outside Nashville more than 20 years ago, there was not a streetlight visible in any direction, and everyone along the road turned off the outdoor lights at bedtime. On a moonless night, the darkness was broken only by the headlights of passing cars. I used to step outside my door on summer nights just to stare at the Milky Way. I wish I had done it more. As the lights of development have crept in, the Milky Way has faded, receding like a delicate plant under a brutal sun.

Now I step outside my door and stare at the bank of round-the-clock lights from the new houses that have been built on a nearby hillside — potent blue LED lights that assault the eye, even from 100 yards away. I try hard to make peace with the presence of those lights, to see them as cozy reminders of human presence, as neighbors, with all the warm associations that can, at least potentially, entail.

This never works.

Instead, I find myself looking at them compulsively, helplessly, with mild horror — as you might stare at a rash spreading up your arm. The only alternative is to look deliberately away, which is not a comfort. I can’t pretend the lights aren’t there. I’m not blessed with a gift for ignoring problems.

And I can’t help seeing it as a problem. I crave the night so much, miss it so much. This feeling grows in me with every year that passes, and not only because the lights have become increasingly hard to escape. Something in me is changing, and it’s not just the lights that have become intolerable but the driven, narcissistic mode of life they accompany.

Something deep within me recoils from it all and longs to turn toward darkness. Night is when the body goes to ground and the soul comes forth. I knew that as a child, forgot for a while, and now, with age, the knowledge is coming back, forcing itself into my awareness every time I see that bank of lights.

I’m not alone in this, I’m sure. My mother, as she entered old age, sold her house and moved out into the woods, to place where revved-up, lit-up modern life barely intruded at all — no sound of traffic, the night unmarred by lights of any kind.