A few years ago, my relationship to darkness had turned a bit fanatical. I was living on the Canadian Prairies in Regina, Saskatchewan, and I’d found my way into a regimen of extreme early rising. Waking each day sometime after midnight but well before the suggestion of dawn, I would drape myself in a hooded fleece cape, light a votive as thick as my forearm, and carry it like a torch as I puttered importantly around the kitchen, arriving at my desk to scribble longhand as if engaged in some form of monastic cosplay.

My obsession with the smallest…