“Light of the world”

“Light of the world” is the phrase Ish reaches for as electric light fades, joining a visible failure of the power system to the loss of life and knowledge that the lights have come to represent. Its force lies in that double meaning: the lamps dim in one room, while the scale of the image opens onto the history of humanity.

The Phrase and Its Associations

Ish thinks, “The lights are going out. The lights of the world!” The line begins with the immediate fact of diminishing illumination, then enlarges it through “the world.” In a later reflection, he places that image beside the phrases “Light of the world! Light of life! Light of knowledge!” The repetition makes illumination more than a practical convenience: it gathers together the material power of electricity and the meanings people attach to light as a condition of life and understanding.

The Failing Lights

The phrase arises as the electrical system visibly weakens. In Ish’s living room, shadows seem to spread from behind the chairs; outside, the street-lights grow less luminous and more yellow. Princess senses Ish’s nervousness and comes to him, though the fading light itself means nothing to her. The contrast makes the crisis both intimate and uneven: Ish recognizes what the lights signify, while his companion responds only to his distress.

After the generators begin dropping out of the system, the decline compounds. Ish wakes to lamps whose filaments glow orange-red, dim enough that he can look at them without hurting his eyes; the room has fallen into half-darkness although he has not switched the lamps off. The gradual change gives the expression a concrete measure. The “lights of the world” are not extinguished in a single stroke: their disappearance is a process unfolding in front of him.

A Civilizational Image

Ish’s response moves between panic and recollection. He feels like a child going alone into the dark, but steadies himself by remembering how long the Power-and-Light system continued to function after people were gone. On his first day back from the mountains, water still poured from the tailraces and the generators still hummed, reassuring him that conditions were normal. Now the same system’s endurance becomes a measure of its approaching end.

The expression thus holds two scales in tension: failing lamps in a half-dark room and the possible end of the last electric lights in the world. Its echoes of life and knowledge give the mechanical breakdown a human history without making electricity itself equivalent to civilization. The light has sustained Ish’s sense of continuity; as it fades, the phrase lets him register not only darkness but the loss of a world of shared meanings.