In the Dark
The night my mother died; I stood in my parents’ garden
back turned to the light flowing out from the windows of their living room
eyes fixed on the eastern horizon. Taurus facing me before the seven sisters
Mars fast approaching from behind a pineNovember, Central Jutland
In the face of the catastrophic ‘unmaking’ of planetary human life that currently is unfolding under various notions of accelerationism, 6th mass extinction, Gaia’s revenge, or the Anthropocene, it would be, as Deborah Bird Rose (2013) has noted, “a fundamental error [to reproduce] within the context of the Anthropocene the flawed certainties that have contributed to the cascading disasters” (p. 12). To the contrary scholars, writers and prophets need to develop “antidotes and fidelities undreamed of by auditors and other quality control experts … fidelities that put forth entangled fronds, buds and flowers not yet imagined: fidelities that will contribute to trees yet to come, across whose leafy limbs we too may scamper” (Rose, 2013). In the face of the many processes of unmaking currently felt, Rose suggests thinking with the mountain, the deer, the wolves and the wild as a strategy for engaging with unknown and emergent possible worlds of the yet-to-come.
In the history of modern, Western thought the darkness of nighttime inhabits a central, yet ambiguous role for engaging with such unknown and emergent worlds (Bronfen, 2008). It offers potentialities and opportunities for traversing ‘other’ forms of reasoning and desire and appears as a metaphor for the mind in which “the encounter with the nocturnal side … opens the way for a return into a new day” (Bronfen, 2008, p. 70). On the other hand ‘the night’ is also the privileged space for transgressions (Bronfen, 2008, p. 112); the space of madness, the repressed and the wild. In contemporary urbanism this is reflected by the use of artificial lighting as a political technology of inequality in which an opposition between illuminated suburban and commercial areas and the spaces of queer, marginalized and minoritized people, practices and encounters in the dark are established (Branellero et al., 2025; Dunn, 2025, pp. 21–26; Edensor, 2017). As Schivelbusch (1995) remarks “the newer a culture is, the more it fears nightfall” (p. 81). The material (and metaphorical) war that has been waged against darkness as urban, industrial cultures have spread across the planet is striking; a war that, as Schivelbusch emphasizes, has flooded houses, streets, urban spaces, and roads in artificial light and ‘disenchanted’ the night. The ubiquity of artificial light and the effects it has had in the form of ‘light pollution’ are an important backdrop for the engagement with the various shimmerings between dark, light and gloom by a range of contemporary scholars (Branellero et al., 2025; Chartier et al., 2021; Dunn & Edensor, 2021, 2023; Edensor, 2017; Shaw, 2018), encouraging us to acknowledge the different performative roles ‘darkness’ plays in various cultures, practices and power structures.
Not all cultures share this Eurocentric conception of darkness. For instance indigenous cosmologies, such as Inuit (Bordin, 2021) and Māori (Paraha & Schmidt, 2020) offer conceptions of darkness as a dynamic, transformative space linked to everyday experience and performance, and even in Europe the primarily negative coding of ‘darkness’ performed through the church and industrialization was always progression in tandem with more positive understandings about the promises that darkness offers (Edensor, 2017, p. 189; see also Bronfen, 2008). This is also evidenced by contemporary proposals to establish planetary darkness as a common global heritage. Projects such as the Palma Declaration (2007), a UNESCO-supported initiative working from the proposition that that “an unpolluted night sky that allows the enjoyment and contemplation of the firmament should be considered an inalienable right” (3, Principle 1) or Dark Sky International (2025), an international NGO that certifies, advises and educates about how to diminish light pollution and promote Dark Sky Places, of which there are now more than 200. Such examples display what could be termed a strategy for ‘re-enchanting’ the night; a strategy perhaps most clearly stated in Eklöf’s (2020) Darkness Manifesto that takes off from the observation that:
Humanity’s desire to illuminate the world makes the earth viewed from space, glow in the night. Every city and every street is visible along way out in cosmic darkness, which is perhaps one of the most obvious signs that we have entered a new era: the Anthropocene, the time of humans. (Eklöf, 2020, p. 4)
Against this, Eklöf suggests politics and practices for dimming artificial light and allowing nocturnal life (human and non-human) to flourish in the dark, a suggestion that situates the theme of darkness firmly within broader calls for re-wildening culture and society (Dill, 2022) in the face of great Anthropocentric unmaking of biological, planetary life. Eklöf stays within a familiar narrative of (dark) wilderness/wildness as a scarce resource on retreat; to be conserved, preserved, relinquished for its pristine view of the night sky and role for non-human animals and plants. I want to take slightly other routes, than the ones that brought us into this great anthropocentric ‘unmaking’ of the night and the wild, but also routes that may not necessarily bring us back into a pristine past, but rather help us to imagine a hybrid, immanent, emergent and impure ‘cosmopolitics’ for the wild in the Anthropocene; the wild as a more-than-human commons (cf. b(Lorimer, 2020, pp. 192–193).
This article suggests mobilizing embodied experiences of ‘the night’ through walking in the dark, as a speculative opportunity for exploring planetary imaginaries of the Anthropocene. A way of thinking with the dark rather than against it. Echoing Rose (2013), Haraway (2016) suggests that the key aim of current turns towards ‘speculative fabulation’ in eco-critical thinking is to provide accounts of the Anthropocene that “propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth” (p. 10), “thinking as well as making practices, pedagogical practices and cosmological performances” (p. 14). Adding to this, Clark and Szerszynski (2021) call attention to Earth as “a planet of multiple layerings … However much damage some of our species have caused we still dwell amongst an excess of possibilities” (p. 78). Hence, they suggest a “speculative planetology” that may help “to probe out future possibilities open to us and our planet” (Clark & Szerszynski, 2021, p. 188; see also Haldrup, 2023) by enabling us to experience, explore and reflect on the multiple possible configurations and cosmologies of humans, other species and the planet.
“Perfection lies not in completeness but in the richness of … heterogeneity”, Bennett (1994, p. 53) observes in her study of the 19th-Century natural philosophy of American philosopher, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau. For Bennett, Thoreau remains the central figure as challenger and opponent of the familiar narrative of ‘disenchantment’ of modern life not only by challenging dominant narratives of the environment but also by pointing to ‘the wild’ as an immanent and transformative aspect of everyday life “into which one is thrown populated by the very same entities of ordinary life—but now they are experienced anew and revealed in all their complex, lively and enlivening glory” (Bennett, 1994, pp. xii–xiii). It is in Thoreau’s embodied environmental experiments and explorations of the wild through walking, climbing and cultivating that we see glimpses of heterogenous and immanent multiple ‘other’ worlds emerge. As also Buell (1995, p. 139; see also Bennett, 1994, 2009) observes, Thoreau’s impact on and relevance for the contemporary environmental imagination may be more closely related to the way his environmental projects offer a resource or laboratory for replacing human-centered with more eco-centered forms of thinking and doing than for his books and essays.
In recent years the interest in ‘walking’ and other forms of embodied methodologies has increasingly emerged as a creative, performative and speculative approach to research creation (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 89), aimed at uncovering new and emergent forms of knowledge. Such methodologies aim to explore the potentiality of landscapes, spaces and times (Manning, 2016; Sheller, 2014; see also Gandy, 2022, pp. 140–146; Haldrup, 2010). In this article I will, in dialogue with the Thoreau, mobilize ‘walking’ and ‘sensing’ as ways of engaging with landscapes and environments. While Thoreau’s writings on walking (especially in his 1851 essay) are broadly acknowledged as a key to understanding his political philosophy and ecology (see in particular Bennett, 1994), his simultaneous engagement in exploring darkness and night has often been downplayed as a mere “a negative, a passive, and a paradoxical version” (Richardson, 1986, pp. 324–326) of his thoughts. However, these were decisive to developing his particular philosophy of man (sic!) as an inhabitant of nature rather than member of society, and Nature as a field of possibility, heterogeneity and emergence. In particular I will draw on Thoreau’s writings on ‘Walking’ (1851), ‘Life in the woods’ (1854) and ‘Night and moonlight’ (1863) as creative, speculative and poetic testimonies of the wild with special attention to his description of the transformative potentials of night time and darkness as a resource and lab for navigating planetary imaginaries.
Walking
Even when I gaze upwards on a clear September night such as this,
stars and other objects in the sky
are staged by an absent sun
as well as the shimmering and reflections from streetlights,
illuminations and passing cars.
Colorful. Bluish, greyish, greenish, sometimes reddish.
Ambient and diffuse.
Light is ever-present in the dark, in the city.September, Copenhagen
As Thoreau (1863/2008) observes in his essay on ‘Night and moonlight’, “even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day, where the sunbeams are revelling” (p. 255). Darkness is always experienced through a perceptual filter not only of shimmering lights from distant sources, whether it be moonlight, reflections of sunbeams from below the horizon reaching Earth’s surface through multiple layers of dust or city lights dispersed through the thin fog emerging from the warm, humid air in the September night. Perception is also synesthetic in ways that transgress the visual dominance of life in the hours of the day:
In the night eyes are partly closed, or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field emits its odor now, swamp-pink in the meadow, and tansy in the road; and there is a peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels. The senses of both hearing and smell are more alert. … From time to time, high up on the sides of hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air: a blast which has come up from the sultry planes of noon. It tells of the day, of sunny noon-tide of hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid flowers. It is an air in which work has been done, which men have breathed. It circulates from woodside to hillsides like a dog that has lost its master, now that the sun has gone (Thoreau, 1863/2008, pp. 251–252).
The heath is dark and windy. Clouds obscure the sky. Nothing to see.
I stumble my way, feeling with each step the track and the stones beneath my feet.
In open landscapes such as this, my eyes try to fixate on the horizon rather than looking up,
whereas in the city my gaze is being forced upwards away from the lights on the ground
I notice a radio mast flashing. One flash per second. I pause to readjust my sight.
As some of the clouds drift by, I watch Jupiter ascending over the horizon.
To my left, lights flicker in the sky.
Late echoes of the unusual Northern Lights we had last night.
To the West a blurry white moon hides behind a curtain of clouds.
Below a greenish beam of light, probably from the greenhouses 8-10 miles away.
Walking down the old glacier riverbed, cloaked in Darkness.
My fix point in the horizon disappears.
I hear sounds. Small animals…mice, squirrels… in the grass and shrubs?
As I stumble my way upwards again, I first hear the wind in the small birches, aspen and juniper trees; then feel its warmth as it caresses my neck and chins. Comforts me.
Again, I see the radio mast and Jupiter just above the horizon.October, Central Jutland
When walking in the dark the various contours and degrees of darkness also shape how we move through it. Being accustomed to walking in open landscapes in the countryside we keep our eyes on the horizon striving to differentiate the various shades of darkness as they appear in different contours of the landscape. We anticipate the road before us, the potential darkening of our surroundings if entering a valley or a forest, or the broadening of the perspective of vision if entering open spaces or hills. This is also where we encounter celestial bodies, stars, planets the moon, emerging right over the horizon and upwards; a continuum that connects the landscape below with the contours of the sky above, and attune our body to journeying in time with the distant lights of the cosmos (Shaw, 2024).
In the city we must allow our gaze to move upwards towards zenith to see them, as our immediate surroundings are scattered with, if not surrounded by, walls of light. But still, they are there, faint but distinct to the eye. In the city, we still rely on the streetlight to position our feet without falling, whereas the dark open landscapes enable us (and make it necessary for us) to feel our way as we walk the ground. It is necessary to trust your feet to sense the ground and avoid stumbling across stones or loose gravel.
But to Thoreau there is more in the act of walking than the enjoyment of sensuous stimuli and recreation. The act of walking is performative as it enacts a “comparative freedom” (Thoreau, 1851/2008, p. 169) to the land; a right to connect to ‘the wild’ and the commons. Led by “the subtle magnetism of nature” (Thoreau, 1851/2008, p. 169, 179) and the mythology emerging from the wild and untamed, the walker may find himself themselves entering strange lands beyond the jurisdiction and knowledge of their public and private owners (p. 185).
During my night walks in the city, I frequently encountered youths gathering in basements, parks or urban beaches to chat, party, talk or hang out. In the nature national park on the outskirts of Copenhagen, I camped with people, who emphasized night walking and sleeping in the outdoor terrains around the city as an antidote to claustrophobia induced by the pace and pressures of contemporary work and family life. Many people pointed to COVID-19 as their seminal experience of this.
Sensing
It is half past ten and the party is slowly building up.
Someone opens the door and shouts. “It’s now. The clouds have cleared. Who wants to go.”
It is the park ranger I sat next to, at this festive dinner in the middle of the forest.
We were just talking about the cloudy sky
and how unfortunate it was when being in a in the middle of a Dark Sky Park.
But now the sky seems clear, and we leave the house.
About 15 people join us. Many not knowing why. They just follow
We walk out into the forest. Silently. Fast. The path is winding,
uneven and hardly noticeable buried in soft leaves.
I can see some stars over the trees, but not much and the pace is high.
We walk further for 15 minutes, and suddenly we are standing at the cliff.
The line between water and sky is fascinating. Two shades of darkness.
The sea with glimpses of white foam and waves. The sky with stars.
It seems like they are mirroring each other but they are not.
I hear the silent thunder from the rolling waves 100 meter downwards.
Even the limestone seems dark. We start walking along the cliff. Faster, faster in a single file along the cliff. It feels staggering, and I use all my energy to keep my feet on the slippery and stone filled ground anxious not to fall over.
Suddenly we stop.
What looks like a palace illuminates the forest and reflects in the lake. It almost looks like the forest is burning. Above it the Orion constellation is hovering over the scenery.
Even the Nebula is clearly visible both in the sky and besides the lights in the pondMarch, Dark Sky Park Møn and Nyord
It is strange how the interplay between senses influences their various qualities. In the dark feet seek and discover what the eye cannot, and as I move, walking and imagining “becomes an entangled way of perceiving the world: the shapes and forms of the things I see gradually blur and merge into each other, becoming something other, something unfamiliar” (Jeffrey, 2023, p. 90). Feeling your way through the darkness as you move increases other senses, but also amplifies the visual. It is as though the perception is not diminished by the darkness but increased and acquired with new abilities for being attentive. The feeling of the soft layer of leaves in the forest moves to the foreground. You sense the elasticity of the ground with every step. Your ears attune to every soft rustle, mice, squirrel. You feel your way forward to avoid treacherous branches and hidden roots.
In the forest the darkness becomes darker. Emerging from the shades of the forest to the open horizon at the edge of the cliff is staggering, senses are alert and vision takes over once more. But even visual impressions are disturbed, distorted, fragmented, and recombined when walking in the dark. A black pond, reflecting illuminated windows suddenly appears to mirror a palace in flames under the sky, and even mirrors the stars in the sky.
During a night walk in the newly designated ‘Urban Nature National Park’ on the outskirts of Copenhagen I encountered this distorted and fragmented sensing in an almost flat landscape. It is an old sea bed, for centuries used as a dumping ground for rubble and stones from the expanding Copenhagen metropolitan area and before that, an archipelago with scattered stone age settlements. The islands are still visible even at night as large hills rising on the margins of the illuminated frontiers of the city. Apart from that everything is flat. I walked one dark winter’s night, feeling my way through the flooded meadows to figure out tracks that were walkable. Hardly visible and indistinguishable from the ponds that surrounded me I lost any sense of direction (apart from the city glow from afar), sky and earth seemed all dark and indistinguishable. I stopped and paused for a while until I noticed how the sparse moonshine lit up the animal trails left by cows and sheep, providing me with a shimmering map of which paths to walk.
In his book on Walden, or life in the woods Thoreau (1854/2012) addresses this disorientation of the senses as part of a longer passage on night fishing. Having described how he played music to charm the fish and the birds by night, lighting a bonfire on the shores and tossing the burning brands into the air to experience the play of light and darkness in the sky and the hissing sounds as they hit the water, he reflects on the silent practice of holding the lines waiting for the fish to bite, while sitting quietly in his boat:
I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it [the line], indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain purpose down there, and slow to make up its mind. … It was queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered off to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air as well as downward into this element that was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook. (Thoreau, 1854/2012, p. 138)
It is not the darkness as such that disorients. It is the experience of being in the dark and the relations between bodies and the various textures of darkness, shimmer, and glow, and of the altered sensations emerging from the line and the fish in the dark that shapes the experience of being suspended between Nature and Cosmos; hence being able to, as Thoreau expresses it, catch two fishes with one hook.
Navigating
There will be a spectacle tonight.
I saw it from my garden before making my way to the lake
The full moon joined by Jupiter, Mars below and with Taurus and Orion emerging.
Behind to the East both Venus and Saturn.
I look out on the surface of the lake it is black. Totally black. I start to walk. I hear the crackling sound of new ice being formed on the lake’s surface
The lake is surrounded by lights, streetlights, Christmas illuminations, neon signs, that make the surface look black only reflecting the city lights at its edges.
The lake is a vast black hole within this walled community of darkness
I walk around the lake, disappointed and depressed. Claustrophobic
Pass smoking and drinking teenagers hanging out on the benches faced towards the lake,
too young to smoke, too young to drink, probably hiding from the eyes of their parents
Then I see it.
A small reflection between the contours of diminutive ice cracks
Venus shimmering in the black lake’s surfaceJanuary, Copenhagen
Moon, planets and stars have across cultures, geographies and times been pivotal devices for knowing and navigating spaces and keeping track of time. Star constellations such as the seven sisters (Pleiades, Makiri) mentioned at the beginning of this article appear as mythological figures across the planet from the rock art of Lascaux in Europe 16,000 BCE to their role in marking the Māori new year. The loss of the ability to view them clearly is one of the strongest arguments for the current heritagization of the night sky, expressed by, among others, the Palma Declaration and the Dark Sky Movement. Moving in the relative darkness of, for instance, rural and wild areas such as Dark Sky Parks enables us better to ‘see’ the Earth as a planetary landscape and acknowledge our suspension between nature and cosmos. It also teaches us about the pace and rhythms and offers insight into the ‘deep time’ of our planet, the geo-physical and astronomical processes it is part of and the ecosystems we depend on (Beer, 2023, pp. 66, 70; see also Shaw, 2024).
While dampened by the artificial lights of the city the night sky may seem more remote. The darkness of the city nonetheless also carries insight within it. Merciless light streams from facades and lamp posts that circumscribe lakes, parks, and shorelines and in so doing erases their contours and material features, transforming them to dark spaces, excluded from the city during the night. This light diffuses in urban fog, humid air and pollution, illuminating these dark places and equipping them with visible, colorful, and almost tangible and material and form. There is a great difference between moving and navigating horizontally in open, dark landscapes compared with the brute force of light that visually guides one’s steps on pavements lit by lamp posts, with an occasional glance vertically upwards to see if the moon is still in the sky. Also, in the city ‘darkness’ offers orientation points to navigate after. Darkness provides moments for transformation, reflection and reorientation simply as it ‘queers’ our perception of our normal everyday environments, and in so doing, enables us to encounter, ‘the wild’. Ahmed (2006) calls these ‘queer’ moments, “that throw the world up or throw the world to the ground” only to create:
lines that gather … to form new patterns and new ways of making sense. The question then becomes not so much what is a queer orientation, but how we are oriented toward queer moments when objects slip. Do we retain our hold of these objects by bringing them back ‘in line’? Or do we let them go allowing them to acquire new shapes an directions? (Ahmed, 2006, pp. 171–172)
Walking in the dark offers such potential for reshaping perceptions and navigation in the encounter with ‘the wild’. The wild, not as an absolute, pristine wilderness, but in queer, ‘impure’ and relational ways, invitations to take part in practices and temporalities that reshape our “being in the present with a relation to the past and future” (Shotwell, 2016, p. 78). Such wild moments can be encountered in the dazzling embodied disorientation of walking and running through a forest cloaked in dark and suddenly being confronted by illuminated windows or a starlit ocean as well in the vague, but stubborn shimmering of Venus in the black, icy surface of a lake in the city. “Life consists of the wild,” Thoreau (Thoreau, 1851/2008, p. 175) emphasized in ‘Walking’, and he continued that the persistent value we should cherish in ‘the wild’ is as a tension with the tame and the everyday; a tension in which ‘hope’ and ‘future’ resides (Thoreau, 1851/2008, p. 176). The wild, not as an absolute, pristine wilderness, but as a relationality.
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Planetary Imaginaries (Conclusion)
A central argument of the current ‘planetary turn’ in the humanities (Chakrabarty, 2019) is that the great Anthropocene ‘unmaking’ we are confronted with through biological mass extinction and global climate warming in effect shows us Earth as a biological and geophysical system acting back upon us a species. A break with the dynamics that have produced these “cascading disasters” (Rose, 2013, p. 12) implies a departure from human-centered imaginaries and cosmologies. We must re-write, reimagine, and reframe our role as a planetary species inhabiting (rather than sustainable controlling) metabolic processes with the Earth as a celestial body (Haldrup, 2023). As both biological and myth-producing creatures, however, we already possess the mythological and cosmological capabilities to produce such new speculative fabulations in order to rework our cosmologies, discover humanity as a planetary species, and, hence, avoid the ‘unparalleled catastrophe for our species’ and ‘give humanness a different future’ (Wynter & McKittrich, 2015).
Haraway (2016) calls for speculative fabulations on hybrid human-nonhuman entanglements, and Clark and Szerszynski (2021) suggest a ‘comparative speculative planetology’ exploring multiple and pluriversal planetary worlds. This article has explored darkness as offering a speculative space for reimagining humanity as a planetary species; an opportunity and invitation to observe entanglements between human, nonhuman, cosmological and Earthly landscapes in wild and queer moments; moments in which hope for different planetary futures and entanglements of humans, ecologies and Earth, than the current “cascading disasters” (Rose, 2013, p. 12), can reside and evolve:
Men frequently say to me: “I should think you should be lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.” I am tempted to reply to such. - This whole Earth that we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely. Is not our planet part of the Milky Way? (Thoreau, 1854/2012, p. 100)
Being in the dark offers spaces for de-connecting thoughts from the flow of our day-to-day lives, spaces in which “the subtle magnetism” (Thoreau, 1851/2008, p. 169) of celestial bodies, Earth, moon, stars (and critters of the night), can pull the mind outwards towards other, wilder, deeper and weirder sensations and thoughts. In doing that, darkness offer space for re-valuing dominant Anthropocentric habits and exploring a sense of ‘planetary commoning’, a wild and weird commoning perhaps, but nevertheless a proposition for reconnecting Earth and us beyond the great unmaking that is the Anthropocene.
Postscript
In his final years Henry David Thoreau extended his explorations of ‘walking’ and ‘the wild’ to “take acquaintance with another side of Nature” (Thoreau, 1863/2008, p. 249)—Darkness—and to explore the merits of walking in the dark. This article has been in dialogue with Thoreau’s unfinished project, and reflects on a lifetime of walking in the dark in rural, urban, wild and suburban landscapes. More specifically, the diary quotes in this article have been drawn from texts written in relation to ten night walks in Copenhagen (where I live), Central Jutland (where I was born) and the Dark Sky Park of Møn and Nyord in autumn, winter and spring 2024-2025 as part of ongoing embodied research on walking in the dark. All photographs were taken by the author. The first version of this paper was presented at the Darkness: Invisible imaginaries conference in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat, January 2025. I am grateful for comments and suggestions from participants in these events.