No One to See It

You write that the fog has sat over the harbor thick enough this week that you cannot see the next lamp from the one you just finished, and that most nights lately there has been no one out on the streets to see any of it either, not a cart, not a lit window, nobody passing to notice you were ever there. You ask, plainly, why light a lamp that nobody tonight will use.

Ask yourself first what the lamp was for, before you ask whether it worked tonight. If it was only ever meant for the eyes that happened to be looking, you are right to wonder, and you might as well go home early. But that was never what it was for.

Years back I fell into counting my nights by how many people thanked me for the light, and it made me a worse lamplighter, not a better one. I found myself hurrying past the lamps that needed the least fuss and slowing down at the ones some passerby might actually notice. The work got smaller to fit whoever happened to be watching it. A round shaped around an audience stops being a round. It becomes a show with a lamp for a prop.

Fog only tells the truth that every clear night hides. Somebody is always missing the light, fog or no fog: a street already asleep, a window shuttered early, a stranger who crossed that corner ten minutes before you reached it and never once looked up. What the round owes has nothing to do with whether the street is full or empty or wrapped in gray to the shoulder. Give the light because it is due, not because it will be counted. Ask yourself something harder while you are out there: were you, even a little, hoping the fog would thin just long enough for somebody to catch you at the work? That question tells you more than the fog ever will.

So walk tonight's round exactly as if the whole town were asleep and no one would ever learn which lamps you reached and which you skipped. Light every one anyway. Then tell me whether the work felt smaller for going unwatched, or whether, oddly, it felt more like the thing itself.

— the Lamplighter

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