The Neglected Dusk

This was a pretty intense section of the book, aside from the familiar sights of our home city. (I actually passed by the street on page 228 everyday during high school.) Squarzoni’s representations of New York are so realistic and encapsulating, that I found myself mesmerized by the amount of effort it must have taken to draw each and every single window and building here. And it really made me realize how meticulous and fragile we are, as a city; founded upon these tiny building blocks of promises for advancement.

One scene that really caught my attention was on page 234, where Camille was watching a building come to life, as the day came to an end. It made me recognize that as New Yorkers, or even as people of the 21^st century, sunsets are no longer the lullabies, telling us that it’s time to rest. Rather, we’ve come to the point where we can stay up all night, due to the artificial lights that we’ve created, and revolved our world around. The sun just happens to be this abstract idea of a new day’s arrival, and of course, our source of climate. But reading this, as the sun goes down, it makes me wonder, how many of us would really notice if it ever came back up.

But let’s zoom into these lit up windows for a bit, and look at the people residing within them. For such a plugged in generation, as shown on page 251, why hasn’t climate change made a bigger stamp on the world? For a time in which people kiss the feet of media, bending and shaping their lives around its every passing whim, why haven’t we been able to gather up a stronger army of environmental soldiers? For all the obvious detrimental implications it holds for ALL of our futures, why is it so easy to just turn off our televisions, and forget about the ice sheets melting, the countries flooding over, the people dying? The fact of the matter is, if we wanted to change, we would have done so by now. It’s not so hard to create hysteria in an uninformed society. (ebola…cough cough) If we wanted to influence our generation for the better, we could have. But that would mean sacrifice. And sacrifice means selflessness. And selflessness doesn’t exist in a world without personal accountability.

So what are we to do? Are we going to sit and watch the world deteriorate before our very eyes, because no one else if joining in the fight? Because we’re afraid of being the first one to stand up, and speak out? On page 259, Squarzoni says that, “changing all by yourself does nothing.” But in this instance, I strongly disagree with him. Because it’s a collection of single lives, that is able to spark revolution. It’s those few, almost inaudible claps from that one person in the crowd, that’s able to catalyze waves of applause. We may be “little lives,” awaiting our fate in “little boxes,” but we are not powerless. And it’s the few rebels, brave enough to turn off their lights, and look at the stars instead, that are able to create that eternally unattainable concept, most of us know of, as change.