Images shot on AgfaPhoto APX 400 in the Rollei 35
Once again I have walked around Mansfield and shot a roll of monochrome film. And once again I was left not knowing what to say in a blog post showing the results from that day.
That was until I heard a quote somewhere – probably on the Secular Buddhism podcast that I’ve mentioned before on here – that struck a nerve with me. About life in general at first, and then later about how it relates sometimes to getting out there and doing some photography.
It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Ooh, deep, man.
Sarcasm aside, let’s see how it relates to me walking around my home town shooting some film.
The more-than-100-year-old origins of this phrase
As with lots of good quotes from long ago, there have been misconceptions about where this really came from.
Some thought it was Confucius, because pretty much everything gets attributed to him, whilst others gave the credit to Eleanor Roosevelt, seemingly because Adlai Stevenson II used it in her eulogy.
However, the consensus about the origins of this phrase, based on the first time it was found in print, points to an English minister called William Lonsdale Watkinson, who said in the 1907 book The Supreme Conquest, and other sermons preached in America the following:
But denunciatory rhetoric is so much easier and cheaper than good works, and proves a popular temptation. Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.
You can see it for yourself right here, at the bottom of page 217 and continuing onto page 218 of the Invincible Strategy chapter of the book.
It’s been paraphrased and modified slightly on many an occasion since then; even once featuring in the Peanuts comic, as you can see on this blog here (I’m not brave enough to be posting famous IP like that on my site).
Slightly modified versions and the meaning of this phrase
For this blog post, I went with the title better to light a candle than curse the darkness, which has a slight difference from the original.
I used a candle, while Watkinson went with the candle. Other people have said one candle, while that Peanuts cartoon went with a single candle.
The article might be definite or indefinite, but the number of candles is the same – one – and so is the meaning of the phrase.
If you’re in darkness, one candle isn’t going to illuminate your entire surroundings. It’s not the same as turning on the light in a pitch-black room, or waiting at midnight for the sun to come up.
But the light from your single candle will help. You can now see a little better than you could before. Doing just that means an improvement in your situation versus merely bemoaning the fact that it’s dark, and that makes it worthwhile.
It’s the same with any issue you may find yourself having in life. Doing something small is better than doing nothing and complaining.
One step forward is progress, and any bit of progress is better than no progress at all. Especially if the alternative is to sit, wallow, and grumble.
So how does this relate to my photography?
I’ve kind of got too many rolls of film stockpiled at home.
When I think about how often I’ve actually got out and shot some in the last couple of years and extrapolate that out into the future, it’s going to take me an estimated bloody ages to get through them all.
You can probably see where this is going. Shooting a single one isn’t going to make a noticeable difference to how many I still have. But it’s better than not shooting any and cursing the never-decreasing number of them.
That brings me to this roll of AgfaPhoto APX 400 I used partly in Mansfield and finished off somewhere else. It wasn’t a new experience for me, and the results weren’t really that different to, or any better than, what I got on previous occasions like here and here and here.
It would be nice if I could go somewhere like Barcelona or Paris more often, but you can’t just go to a different country every weekend, can you? I like doing some photography at British seaside places too, but even a drive to the nearest coast to me, to somewhere like Mablethorpe, is a couple of hours each way.
It doesn’t sound like an insurmountable distance, but it definitely helps to make trips out there not happen very often.
So what happens more often than not and more often than I would like is that I just end up shooting my film around Mansfield and Nottingham again and again.
This is not a complaint, because even doing that is better than not doing anything.
Getting out and enjoying shooting another roll in places I’ve already done it at plenty of times before is another candle I’ve lit when I could have bemoaned the fact it’s harder to get further afield and cursed that darkness instead.
Also, how does it relate to my writing?
There is of course another part of my whole creative process when I do some photography. It’s what you’re reading now. I don’t want to just shoot these rolls of film and do nothing with the results. So I write these blog posts to go with them.
But just like I have the stockpile of unshot film, I also have quite the backlog of rolls I have shot and am yet to find time to get published on here.
Until now, these images on AgfaPhoto APX 400 that I put in the Rollei 35 on that day in Mansfield were in that category.
And again, getting this one blog post done isn’t going to make a noticeable difference to how many I still have to do. But it’s better than not doing it and complaining that the to-do list never shortens.
Better to light a candle and all that.
To go a bit more granular, I’m never able to get these posts done in one sitting either. Maybe I’m a slow writer. Or maybe it’s Parkinson’s law in action – the idea that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
And when I have no deadline, that time available is quite long. As long as I allow it to be. Which usually means quite a long time.
This is again not a complaint. It’s more another example of the main point of this thing. Because I never sit down for an entire day to write. It’s more like finding a spare hour or two around other life commitments.
Spending that hour writing half a blog post and leaving it unfinished always makes me wish I could stay there doing it for longer.
But utilising that time I do have rather than cursing not having more is just lighting that single candle in the vast darkness again.
Final thoughts on why it’s better to light just one candle
I think the idea of lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness is related to that other old saying, that Rome wasn’t built in a day.
You eat an elephant one bite at a time. Run a marathon one metre at a time. Things worth doing don’t happen instantly. You have to do them step by step.
But that’s not the main takeaway of it all, for me. For me, it’s more akin to yet another old saying. About being the change you want to see, which Gandhi didn’t say.
If there is darkness and you wish there was some light, and you have a candle, light that candle.
If things seem negative, in whatever way, and you can do something positive, no matter how small, do that something.
If you’re sitting there not creating anything but you have the means to create something, again no matter how small, create that something.
The world will have something it didn’t have before, like a small candle burning, and you’ll probably feel better once you’ve alleviated a little bit of that darkness of inactivity around yourself too.
And finally, let’s not forget the first part of what Watkinson said. That denunciatory rhetoric is so much easier and cheaper than good works, and proves a popular temptation.
Let’s try to keep being unnecessarily negative about what other people are making to a minimum too, yes? 🙂
If you liked that take on why it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness and want more blog posts illustrated with film photography, why not have a look at some of these:
And if you think others will find this post worth a read, help them find it by giving it a share 😀
