On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera

Almost all general histories of the lighthouse begin with Alexandria, or before--from the times of the beacons of the Celts--passing through the Tower of Hercules and the earliest medieval lighthouses in France, England, Italy, Spain, and China to the proliferation of lighthouses brought about by Fresnel in nineteenth-century France, and then the most modern ones of the twentieth century. In a few years, this history might include references to the last lighthouses, when GPS and computers have put an end to the need for them. I wonder if one day they will all be decommissioned, and if they will then return to being temples of fire dedicated to the sea, fetishes of the superstitious and seekers of esoteric knowledge, who will keep alive the legends of shipwrecks, lighthouse keepers, and the ghosts that surround them. Or if they will be (as seems their destiny) turned into hotels, museums, relics, for the amusement of millionaires, retired folk, archaeologists, historians, and the curious. Divested of their function, they are collectible objects. They now also have that attractive quality of ruins and decay. For melancholics, they are all the more beautiful.

When will the last boat arrive safely to port thanks to the beams of a lighthouse? Who will be the last lighthouse keeper in the world? Or could it be that the relationship between humans and the sea is so primordial that there will always be someone to switch on--using a button or some other future technology--a light for ships in distress or fishermen? Or perhaps they will shine out as temples or memorials to the thousands of people who lie at the bottom of the sea.

What does it mean to "collect" lighthouses? "Obsession," Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera writes, "is a form of mental collection." Traveling around to see lighthouses, and add them to one's mental collection, is "an attempt to satisfy the vain desire to possess with an immaterial, intangible form of possession, not unlike what one might feel toward a loved one." For Barrera, the attractions of lighthouses are many: they are stolid, impregnable, unchanging when compared with the changeable sea; they represent a kind of immutability of emotion or identity that is, for an anxious or adrift person, something to aspire to. Visiting the Blackwell Light on Manhattan's Roosevelt Island, Barrera imagines that she is "slowly transforming into a sealed tower." "I feel so sane," she writes, "that I must be losing my sanity."

On Lighthouses is arranged as a series of vignettes, each titled for a different lighthouse Barrera has visited: Yaquina Light in Oregon, Tapia Lighthouse in Spain, Goury Lighthouse in Normandy, Jeffrey's Hook--otherwise known as the Little Red Lighthouse--and Blackwell Light in Manhattan, Montauk Point at the end of Long Island. Each vignette mixes memoir, history, literature, and reflection in a way that reminded me of Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, though that book has the careful organization of an academic, and of someone who's come through the existential crisis explored in the book with a kind of resolution. On Lighthouses, by contrast, offers little change, much less resolution: whatever it is that Barrera grapples with, the limits are endemic to her methods--she writes eloquently, for example, about coming to terms with the many lighthouses she'll never "collect."

This book struck a chord with me because I'm a lighthouse-collector, too. I'm writing this from Ocracoke Island in North Carolina's Outer Banks, a short bike ride from a 200-year old lighthouse, a squat brick tower painted bright white, that is the second oldest in operation in the country. When I drive back to New York later this week, several other lighthouses will mark the stations of the journey: the barber-pole light at Cape Hatteras, the country's tallest, the striped light on Bodie Island, the distant tip of Cape Henry across Chesapeake Bay. Barrera's exploration of why she travels to these lighthouses seems right to me: they are discrete and countable, but inexhaustible; their verticality and commanding presence makes them visibly striking, even comforting; and their age makes one feel connected to history, to others. In reading about the New York-area lights, I felt the comforting presence of a fellow traveler, though what Barrera writes about the isolation of lighthouses, and the separation from the world one achieves by identification with them, struck me, too. (I can only assume that Barrera has yet to visit the lighthouses of the Outer Banks, and that once she makes the road trip a second volume is forthcoming.)

"When I visit lighthouses," Barrera writes, "when I read or write about lighthouses, I leave myself behind." This hardly seems true; it isn't true, only an expression of an attempted self-negation. But it's also true, I think, in the sense that the lighthouses, as with many places of great historical importance, invite us to enter into another understanding of time and place, one less shackled by the here and now. It leads Barrera to communion with Robert Louis Stevenson, whose grandfather built the first lighthouses along the dangerous Scottish coast, to Poe, Meville, Verne, and obviously Woolf, and to the lives of the many keepers who sacrificed their selves and sanity to protect the coasts. Even to the first lighthouse-builders, who kept towers of fire to propitiate the gods. As technology progresses and the need for lighthouses diminish, these layers of history become ever more important. Lighthouses become less utilitarian but more meaningful, landmarks on a geography of time and spirit.