My room consists of two beds: one for me and another, smaller one for my daughter. Along with a crib for my son. The dresser and mini fridge are put side by side, and the curtained window is adjacent to the bed. There wasn’t much light in the room, given that the only window is covered, and the time I chose for the experiment was close to the evening, so by the time I was half way through the assignment the sun was setting. I sat on my bed, with one candle in a candle holder and the first chapter of Otranto only inches away from the plain wax candle, I had just bought. The other two were also unused before the experiment, they were fat, decorative ones, and they sat on bed’s head.
It’s easy to say that I was afraid the entire time, my mind kept distracting from the reading material and kept reminding me of the fact that I had a candle on my bed, and every time I would move, it would get unbalanced and tilt a little. Dripping wax on the sheets was the least of my worries, by the time the assignment ended, I was just thankful that my bed didn’t catch fire. I would have to hunch to read next to the light, which had me tired after a maximum of five minutes, so I switched positions and brought the paper closer to me, this meant that I had to move it away from the candle and the lack of light was straining on the eyes. Throughout the experiment I kept shifting between those two positions, mainly. It was one of the most uncomfortable reading experiences I’ve had and reminded me of Pakistan. In Pakistan whenever the electricity would go out and the power generators would die, there were time I had to work under battery lamps, and candles. This assignment was a flashback to the way I had done some of my assignments back home.
In the time span of thirty minutes, I was only able to read ten and a half pages, it seemed that with the irritating lighting, the paper seemed more grainy than usual, every sound from outside the room seemed magnified and my mind wanted to jump onto every distraction. At times the words seemed to morph into other words, ‘if’ would turn into ‘it’ and ‘as’ would turn into ‘an’. It felt like the pages were conspiring with the light, and both of them, against me.
Around the end of the experiment, my back was aching and I desperately wanted to lie down, and suddenly I have a strong dislike for candle light. Reading on laptops and phones is much easier, as you don’t have to worry about the source of light. I have always been a fan of light reading before bed, and reading in the dark, on my phone had never been this difficult. It seems, that I have a new found appreciation for electricity. At the end I would say same experience for someone who have proper reading place with good amount of candles would have been different.
