The Brightness of the Night Sky

Abstract

So writes Jack Finney in Time and Again, his glorious and loving portrait of the New York City of 1882 as seen through the eyes of a late-twentieth-century time traveler. Even at that time, New York was a great metropolis of almost two million people, most living in Manhattan.

There were lights, thousands of them, hut of no brightness: these were thousands of tiny flecks affecting the darkness not at all; they were gaslights, most of them, white at this distance and almost steady; but there was candlelight, too, and I supposed, kerosene. No colors, no neon, nothing to read, just a vast blackness pricked with lights...