Forty Lamps

You ask what the use is. Every lamp you light is out by morning, you say, and the same forty lamps want lighting again at dusk, and nothing is ever finished. Then you ask whether I have ever felt this myself, which is the only part of your letter I can answer quickly. Of course I have. Every lamplighter has, mostly in the first fog.

But turn your complaint around and look at it from the other end. What would finished be? A lamp that stays lit forever? We had one of those once, a sealed light at the harbor mouth, kept burning the year round. Nobody looked at it. It was furniture. The lamps people watch for are the ones that go out, because those are the ones somebody comes back for.

You say nothing is ever finished, and I say you have discovered the shape of the work, not a flaw in it. The round is not forty lamps. It is one lamp, forty times, and each one is the whole job while your hands are on it. You might suppose that after all these years dusk finds the work easier for me. It does not. It finds me at the first lamp, the same as the first year. What the years gave me is not a shorter round. It is a steadier hand on the wick, and the sense not to argue with the dark about whether the round ought to be needed.

So here is my question back, since you sent me yours. This evening, at the first lamp only, do the whole of the job as if the other thirty-nine were not waiting. Then write and tell me what the round felt like from the second lamp on. I think I know. I would rather you found out.

— the Lamplighter

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.