The Arcades Project - Operi

[;; to this general illumination, urban nighttime itself becomes a sort of ongoing animated
festival-clearly betrays the oriental character of this form of lighting . ...
bf.l
. .§
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The fact that in Berlin, after what is now twenty years of operation, a gas company
can hoast of scareely ten thousand private customers in the year 1846 can be . ..
explained . .. in the following manner: 'For the most part, of course one could
'0 point to general commercial and social factors to account for this phenomenon;
there was still, in fact, no real need for increased activity during the evening and
nighttime hours. m Doli' Sternberger Pwwrama (Hamburg, 1938), pp. 201 202.
Citations from Gottfried Semper, Wissenschaft: Industrie und Kunst (Brunswick,
1852) p. 12; and from Ilandbuch fiir Steinkohlengasbeleltchtltng, ed. N. H.
Schilling (Munich, 1879), p. 21. [T4a,l]
Apropos of the covering over of the sky in the big city as a consequence of
artificial illumination, a sentence from Vladimir Odoievsky's "The Smile of the
Dead": "Vainly he awaited the gaze that would open up to him!' Similar is the
motif of the blind men in Baudelaire, which goes back to "Des Vetters Eckfenster!'"
[T4a,2]
Gaslight and electricity. "I reached the Champs-Elysees, where the cafes concerts
seemed like hlazing hearths among the leaves. The chestnut trees hrushed with
yellow light, had the look of painted objects, the look of phosphorescent trees. And
the eleetric globes-like shimmering, pale moons, like moon eggs fallen from the
sky, like monstrous, living pearls-dimmed, with their nacreous glow, mysterious
and regal the flaring jets of gas, of ugly, dirty gas, and the garlands of colored
glass." Guy de Maupassant Claire de lune (Paris, 1909), p. 122 (,'La Nuit eauehemal'''