--- > Michel Siffre was more blunt about his  time in isolation, in what he called “the terrifying sensation of infinite space.” He wrote: “I now understand why in their myths, people have always situated Hell underground.” And this is the language of the people most eager to explore the dark. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jjpbpp6efz8vzk1kym8brka5) --- > But “can you see the  dark” is a revealing question, because it breaks  down all the abstract language we so often use to talk about it into a single, base anxiety. Here is how I would describe the fear of dark, once you  suck all the poeticism out of it: either there is  nothing there, or there is something there. That’s it. That’s all there is. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jjpbrmawzn9wrda45deaxkh9) --- > It’s absurd how many of my own childhood anxieties manifested as little more complicated than a man standing in the corner at night. A coat over  a chair, a shadow across a bookshelf, a creak of the floorboards, all would near-immediately become that most horrifying of apparitions: a man. A man in the corner. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jjpc33bqvgv5yk95gs18j17q) --- > The darkness of the sky is measured on something called the “Bortle scale.” It goes from 1 to 9, and the higher the scale, the more light pollution you’re experiencing—and thus, the less able you are to see celestial bodies. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jjpdh15b28tqd5d7r2d1x05f) --- > Human-kept history does not have a consistent calendar. Across thousands of years of civilization, we have not carefully cross-referenced our date-keeping, nor made sure that our scales of time remained consistent. Knowing a precise date from millennia ago is near impossible, even with modern science like carbon dating. To weld together disparate records from the span of all cultures, you’d need some unignorable event that occurred at some immovable point in time. Something like darkness falling in the middle of the day. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jjpe51hk44avgjmwrq108v79) --- > I don’t…know what happens after you die. I don’t know what happens while you’re dying. But throughout writing this, I  keep having this thought, this dream, of an astronaut somehow thrown into intergalactic space, the barren distance between galaxies, the truest void that exists. I think about how you would still be able to see stars– or rather,   you would see entire galaxies as single points of  light– but that light would share no illumination.   > You would look down at your body and see  nothing. You would move your hand over your   face and the galaxies would disappear behind your own darkness. That dark would be the only way you could recognize yourself. There’s nothing there– there’s something there. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jjpf6kahemvyek936wnpwwft) - _Note_: I love the idea of “the dark would be the only way to recognize yourself” – existing only through the absence. ---