Promise and Conquest

I.

On an August evening, a small group ascends to the upper deck of an unlit double-decker bus. "Nearly half of all gas lanterns in the world are right here in Berlin," the guide from the Gaslight Culture Association explains with unconcealed pride, as the bus rolls through Charlottenburg. The participants — mostly past sixty — lean forward to better see what makes this special. No insects swarm around the lanterns. "Gaslight is nature," someone murmurs reverently, while outside Berlin's last 20,000 gas lanterns emit their golden-yellow glow.

The irony of this scene during the Long Night of Museums escapes most: they are making a pilgrimage to precisely the technology that once, as the spearhead of modernity, conquered the night. What began in 1826 with the first gas lanterns on Unter den Linden — the systematic expulsion of darkness — is now protected cultural heritage. The preservation society fights doggedly for every single lantern, maps monument zones, organizes nostalgia tours. The former avant-garde of night conquest has become an endangered habitat. The association defends its legacy with the fervor of conservationists. "The light quality unmatched by any electric lamp," the brochure enthuses, forgetting that people once spoke exactly this way about electric light when it replaced gas.

II.

The story unfolding in this dark bus through illuminated Berlin is paradigmatic of a larger pattern. Modernity follows a peculiar three-step: it conquers the unavailable, makes it available, and thereby generates new, unforeseen unavailabilities. Three great campaigns of this conquest can be distinguished, each with its own temporality, its own logic, its own tragedy: night, winter, old age.

Night was the first front. As the daily return of the uncontrollable, it imposed its rhythm upon humanity. Eight to twelve hours of darkness, every day anew. The first gas lamps in Paris and London promised safety for citizens — though initially this meant protection less from nature than from one's own species: the dark alleys harbored human dangers, light was meant to create order. But what began as a police measure became a cultural revolution.

When Louis XIV decreed that Paris be illuminated with candles, the Sun King did not suspect the avalanche he was setting in motion. He tolerated no darkness in his capital — a command that became modernity's program. But only industrial gas lighting truly made the night available. Precisely at this moment, on the threshold of its annihilation, Novalis rediscovered the night. "Holy, ineffable, mysterious night," he sang in 1800 in his Hymns. While in London the first gasometers were being built, he celebrated darkness as the space of love, dreams, death: "More heavenly than those glittering stars seem to us the infinite eyes that night has opened within us."

The irony is breathtaking: Romanticism discovers the night at the very moment it begins to disappear. Novalis's Hymns are not timeless nature poetry — they are combat writings against the Enlightenment in the most literal sense. Not for nothing is it called "Enlightenment" in English, not for nothing were the Middle Ages labeled the "Dark Ages." The equation is inscribed in language itself: light equals reason equals progress, darkness equals superstition equals backwardness. Novalis turns this equation on its head. His night gives birth to insights that daylight never reaches. "Must morning always return? Does the power of the earthly never end?" These questions are directed against a modernity that will tolerate no more darkness. Novalis sensed what the nostalgics in the Berlin double-decker experience two hundred years later: that with light comes also loss.

III.

The conquest always follows the same pattern, which can be studied exemplarily in the gas lantern. First it is luxury: the rich illuminate their salons while the common folk grope in darkness. At Versailles they dance by a thousand candles, in the suburbs reigns blackness. Then comes democratization: gas lamps first in the better neighborhoods, then everywhere. The middle class wants to share in the light. Finally, the imperative: whoever doesn't work at night is considered lazy. Shift work is invented. The conquered night becomes a shackle.

The perfidious aspect of this pattern: workers are punished twice. First excluded from the luxury, then subjected to the compulsion. The factory worker who couldn't afford candles must now work night shifts in the gas-lit factory. The maidservant who once had her evening free at nightfall now cleans until midnight in illuminated mansions. The conquest of night does not liberate everyone equally — it creates new hierarchies of compulsion.

But the story doesn't end with conquest. Every conquered unavailability gives birth to new longings. Today, stressed managers — grandchildren of those factory owners who once invented the night shift — pay thousands for "Darkness Retreats" in complete blackness. Light pollution becomes a topic, "Dark Sky Parks" emerge. Where once night was feared, it is now sought — but as commodity, as experience, as wellness product. The irony is complete: the descendants of the light-bringers pay fortunes to experience darkness again.

Winter followed as the second campaign. For millennia it forced retreat, stockpiling, huddling together. Pieter Bruegel's winter paintings from the 1560s are documents of a vanished art: the art of arrangement with the unavailable. In "The Hunters in the Snow" (1565), three men return with meager catch and tired dogs. The trees are bare, the sky overcast. But that is not the whole story. In the valley people skate, children play on the ice, smoke rises from chimneys. People have settled in.

What Bruegel shows is no idyll — the hunters are exhausted, the catch only a single small fox. But neither is it apocalypse. Winter is neither friend nor foe, but condition. One lives not against it but with it. The cold structures life, creates different activities, different communities. Frozen water becomes a traffic surface, snow becomes a playground, the long darkness becomes time for stories by the fire. An entire culture of winter had developed over centuries — techniques of survival that were simultaneously techniques of living.

Three hundred years later the conquest begins. First the upper class rediscovers winter — as aesthetic experience. The Grand Tour now leads also to the Alps, once considered threatening. St. Moritz transforms from farming village to Belle Époque spa, where fur coats glide over ice skates. Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain residents cure their tuberculosis in heated sanatoriums while down in the valley the farmers struggle with the cold. What Bruegel's peasants knew as harsh necessity becomes sensation for city dwellers. Winter sports emerge — first as aristocratic pleasure, then as bourgeois fashion.

Technical revolution follows aesthetic revolution. What in Roman baths was luxury for the few becomes, through central heating, the modern standard — but again it follows the familiar pattern. First the upper class heats while workers freeze. Then comes democratization: coal stoves, oil heating, district heating. Winter becomes optional. Finally, the imperative: whoever freezes has failed. Energy poverty becomes a disgrace.

IV.

The third and most radical conquest we are experiencing right now: that of old age. While night and winter return cyclically — and thus always offer new chances for conquest — old age is singular, irreversible, final. Its conquest must therefore be absolute.

The signs are everywhere. In Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel has blood from twenty-year-olds transfused — $8,000 per liter of young plasma. Biotech founder Bryan Johnson swallows 111 pills daily, measures 78 biomarkers, and has machines monitor him nightly to "reverse his biological aging process." His declared goal: to have the organs of an 18-year-old at 45. The irony that he looks like a mummified teenager escapes him. Jeff Bezos invests billions in Altos Labs, a startup that wants to "hack" aging like a computer program.

The language reveals everything: one no longer ages, one "optimizes one's longevity." One doesn't retire, one "pivots to new challenges." Frailty is "suboptimal performance." Death itself becomes the "ultimate bug" to be fixed. Aubrey de Grey, guru of the immortality scene, proclaims: "The first person to live to 1000 has already been born." The audience — average age 65 — applauds frenetically.

This refusal of age marks a radical break with everything that being human has meant for millennia. The Greeks knew kalokagathia, the unity of beautiful and good — but their ideal of humanity included dignified aging. Socrates was seventy when he drank the hemlock, and was considered the epitome of wisdom precisely in his old age. The Roman senators were named after the "senex," the old man. Age meant experience, judgment, authority. Unthinkable today: a seventy-year-old startup founder is considered inspiring, a seventy-year-old sage irrelevant. We have robbed old age of its symbolic dignity and left only the naked biology — which must now be "hacked."

The pattern repeats with merciless precision — with night, with winter, and now with age. Always the same three-step: first it is privilege of the rich, then longing of the masses, finally duty for all. First only a few can afford it, then everyone wants it, in the end everyone must participate. Liberation becomes compulsion. First youthfulness is privilege of the rich — they can afford the treatments, the personal trainers, the stem cell cures. Then the middle class wants to keep up: fitness studios for seniors, yoga courses from sixty, "Best Ager" marketing everywhere. Finally it becomes imperative: whoever at seventy no longer looks like fifty, whoever stops lifelong learning, whoever ceases to "grow" — has given up.

The conquest of old age is more radical than all previous ones. Night returns every morning, one can sleep it off. Winter comes every year, one can flee to the south. But old age? There is no morning after, no spring. The conquest must be total.

V.

At this point the deeper logic of these conquests reveals itself. It is not simply about technical progress or increased comfort. It is about the abolition of the rhythms that once structured human life.

Night enforced rest and created space for dreams, intimacy, regeneration. It was the daily boundary that forced us to pause. In the shelter of darkness emerged another form of community — more intimate, quieter, slower. Lovers found each other without words, children listened to stories, elders gazed at the stars.

Winter demanded foresight and rewarded with solidarity. The cold forced cooperation: people shared wood and warmth, huddled together, told each other stories by the fire. The enforced inactivity became time for reflection, for craft, for the transmission of knowledge.

Old age brought permission for slowness. The old knew what they no longer had to do. They were allowed to forget, allowed to be tired, allowed to leave the field to the young. Their authority rested not on performance but on experience.

What looked like limitation was balance. Night enforced rest — but this rest arose by itself, without planning, without effort. Winter enforced togetherness — but this togetherness cost no willpower. Old age enforced slowness — but this slowness was permission, not task. No one had to want what matter enforced.

Today we must produce what once arose. Mindfulness apps are supposed to replace what darkness enforced. Team-building seminars are supposed to replace what cold enforced. Anti-aging protocols are supposed to replace what old age permitted. All this costs energy, money, attention — and works worse than the original.

What we conquer by force becomes unavailable again at a higher level. The conquered night returns as insomnia, the climate-controlled winter as loneliness in heated apartments, eternal youth as exhaustion from eternal new beginnings.

VI.

In the unlit bus through Charlottenburg, this dialectic becomes palpable. The passengers mourning gaslight here embody the irony of history themselves: they make pilgrimage to precisely the technology that once conquered the night. What their ancestors celebrated as progress, they defend as tradition. The gas lantern, once enemy of night, now counts as its last defender against the LED flood.

"We were able to place 3,300 lanterns under monument protection," the guide explains, while outside another gas lantern is being dismantled by technicians. The conquerors of yesterday are the conquered of today. Modernity devours its children with the precision of clockwork. What Novalis sensed in his Hymns is confirmed: with light comes also loss.

Perhaps therein lies a hope. If every conquest becomes tradition, every progress a monument, then no conquest is final. Night, winter, old age — they may be domesticated but not tamed. In the cracks of permanent availability grows the longing for the unavailable.

The tour ends at Charlottenburg Palace. The participants disembark, some photographing the gas lanterns with their smartphones — devices that shine brighter than any gas lamp. They document with tomorrow's technology yesterday's technology in order to criticize today's technology. A final paradox of this night.

In a few years these last gas lanterns too will have disappeared, banished to museums alongside coal stoves and — who knows — perhaps alongside the first anti-aging clinics. For this conquest too will end, like all before it.

The question is only: what remains to be conquered? Night is defeated, winter climate-controlled, old age is currently being abolished. Only one unavailability still waits, the ultimate one: death itself. The immortality startups are already working on it. "Death is optional," they proclaim. But if even death becomes negotiable — what then becomes of us?

Perhaps our descendants will one day book "mortality retreats" to experience again what finitude means. Perhaps they will wander through museums where what once made humans human is on display: the ability to age, the art of winter, the grace of night. Perhaps they will envy us for what we are currently in the process of losing: the rhythms that gave our lives structure, the limits that made us human.

The bus drives away, unlit, a dark shadow in the radiant city. Behind remain the gas lanterns, 20,000 small flames against the night. No insects swarm around them, no moths burn in their heat. "Gaslight is nature," someone had said during the ride. He was right, only differently than meant: not gaslight is nature, but the longing for it. The longing for what we have conquered and thereby lost. It is the only unavailable thing that remains to us — and perhaps the only light that does not lead creatures astray to destroy them. Unlike all our conquests, it does not lure us to ruin with false promises. It only shows what is missing.