Wait until dark

Sure, more than 9000 square kilometres of surrounding territory in New England and eastern Canada was also affected, but the Darkness in New York immediately became the great urban saga of our fleeting times. The city is like that — it flaunts its celebrations and its struggles as the defining moments of our age.

And the rest of the world responds by taking disproportionate notice. Blackout 2003 has instantly been cast as a sequel to Blackouts 1965 and 1977. New Yorkers were jolted out of their hurried lives, they lit their candles and hung out with neighbours on the streets. A power grid collapsed, and old human bonds were forged. Wow. Let’s learn from them! But perhaps residents of bustling cities around the world have been doing one better already. It in no way absolves their local electricity providers of mismanagement, but across the developing world (and even in chunks of the developed, with cash-strapped California and heat-struck Europe being new members) urbanites are well accustomed to maintaining the rhythms of daily life through light and outage.

But no matter where one resides, no matter if power outages are rare or frequent in one’s habitat, a mystery comes attached, a feeling of losing old certainties, of confronting the unknown. Jhumpa Lahiri, for example, used a blackout to provoke uncharacteristic cruelty in the opening story in her Pulitzer-winning collection. With economists forecasting more largescale breakdowns, do we see a new genre of literature developing?