Uses of light

What are you really trying to do?

Our tutoring consultant gets up early on Saturdays, and this time of the year he heads to the bus station before dawn.  On the way he passes a certain very bright light (shown at left).  It floods the street and his eyes, making it hard to see if there’s a car coming toward the intersection from that direction.  One morning when he was ahead of schedule and curious, he investigated.  The light was clearly intended to illuminate the exit from a parking garage.  However, it shines directly into the eyes of any driver coming out, as well as anyone passing on the street or nearby.  As a means of helping people to see, it is worse than useless.  All that can be seen is the light.

There are others of this kind around Alexandria.  Several on the outside of an architectural firm (which should know better) shine up into our consultant’s kitchen, three stories above.  No doubt they look nice on drawings of buildings to be built; in practice, they’re somewhere between useless and dangerous.  In principle they’re there to allow us to see things; in practice, they’re all that can be seen.

There are lights whose purpose is to be seen.  Taillights and turn signals on cars, for instance, are not sources of illumination but information. Christmas lights on trees are decoration, not something to read by.  But streetlights are supposed to light the street.  Many of them in Old Town Alexandria shine up, down, and in all directions, including into the eyes of anyone nearby, and so serve mainly to be seen, not to light the street.  It is probably a good thing that they are deliberately old-timey, some indeed gaslight, and not very bright.

Our tutor mulled over the idea as he went in to work.  It’s a metaphor of wide application.  He can make short work of almost any problem his students are presented with, as befits one with his background and especially with his experience over the past years in High School math problem sets and SAT materials.  Indeed, he can deploy obsolete techniques in an impressive display of virtuosity from time to time.  But these are all lights to be seen.  His brilliance is beside the point.  He has to illuminate the problem for the student, which is a much more difficult thing.  Just showing that it can be solved is sometimes, not often, a good first step.  Showing how to solve it is much more important.

So we suggest that you ask yourself, from time to time: am I doing this to show how brilliant I am, that is, to be seen; or to illuminate the world for others to see?