The Anthropocene Reviewed(26)

I cannot tell if the day

is ending, or the world, or if

the secret of secrets is inside me again.





* * *





A good sunset always steals the words from me, renders all my thoughts as gauzy and soft as the light itself. I’ll admit, though, that when I see the sun sink below a distant horizon as the yellows and oranges and pinks flood the sky, I usually think, “This looks photoshopped.” When I see the natural world at its most spectacular, my general impression is that more than anything, it looks fake.

I’m reminded that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tourists would travel around with darkened, slightly convex mirrors called Claude glasses. If you turned yourself away from a magnificent landscape and looked instead at the landscape’s reflection in the Claude glass, it was said to appear more “picturesque.” Named after seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, the glass not only framed the scene but also simplified its tonal range, making reality look like a painting. Thomas Gray wrote that only through the Claude glass could he “see the sun set in all its glory.”



* * *





The thing about the sun, of course, is that you can’t look directly at it—not when you’re outside, and not when you’re trying to describe its beauty. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes, “We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk around carefully averting our faces this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.”

In all those senses, the sun is godlike. As T. S. Eliot put it, light is the visible reminder of the Invisible Light. Like a god, the sun has fearsome and wondrous power. And like a god, the sun is difficult or even dangerous to look at directly. In the Book of Exodus, God says, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” No wonder that Christian writers have for centuries been punning on Jesus as being both Son and Sun. The Gospel according to John refers to Jesus as “the Light” so many times that it gets annoying. And there are gods of sunlight everywhere there are gods, from the Egyptian Ra to the Greek Helios to the Aztec Nanahuatzin, who sacrificed himself by leaping into a bonfire so that he could become the shining sun. It all makes a kind of sense: I don’t just need the light of that star to survive; I am in many ways a product of its light, which is basically how I feel about God.

People ask me all the time if I believe in God. I tell them that I’m Episcopalian, or that I go to church, but they don’t care about that. They only want to know if I believe in God, and I can’t answer them, because I don’t know how to deal with the question’s in. Do I believe in God? I believe around God. But I can only believe in what I am in—sunlight and shadow, oxygen and carbon dioxide, solar systems and galaxies.

But now we’re already swimming in sentimental waters; I’ve metaphorized the sunset. First, it was photoshopped. Now, it’s divine. And neither of these ways of looking at a sunset will suffice.

e. e. cummings has a sunset poem that goes,


who are you,little i


(five or six years old)

peering from some high


window;at the gold



of november sunset


(and feeling:that if day

has to become night


this is a beautiful way)



It’s a good poem, but it only works because cummings situates the observation in childhood, when one is presumably too innocent to have yet realized how lame it is to write about sunsets. And yet, a good sunset is beautiful, and better still, universally so. Our distant ancestors didn’t eat like us or travel like us. Their relationship to ideas as fundamental as time was different from ours. They measured time not primarily in hours or seconds but mostly in relationship to solar cycles—how close it was to sunset, or to daybreak, or to midwinter. But every human who has lived for more than a few years on this planet has seen a beautiful sunset and paused to spend one of the last moments of the day grateful for, and overwhelmed by, the light.

So how might we celebrate a sunset without being mawkish or saccharine? Maybe state it in cold facts. Here’s what happens: Before a beam of sunlight gets to your eyes, it has many, many interactions with molecules that cause the so-called scattering of light. Different wavelengths are sent off in different directions when interacting with, say, oxygen or nitrogen in the atmosphere. But at sunset, the light travels through the atmosphere longer before it reaches us, so that much of the blue and purple has been scattered away, leaving the sky to our eyes rich in reds and pinks and oranges. As the artist Tacita Dean put it, “Color is a fiction of light.”

I think it’s helpful to know how sunsets work. I don’t buy the romantic notion that scientific understanding somehow robs the universe of its beauty, but I still can’t find language to describe how breathtakingly beautiful sunsets are—not breathtakingly, actually, but breath-givingly beautiful. All I can say is that sometimes when the world is between day and night, I’m stopped cold by its splendor, and I feel my absurd smallness. You’d think that would be sad, but it isn’t. It only makes me grateful. Toni Morrison once wrote, “At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” So what can we say of the clichéd beauty of sunsets? Perhaps only that they are enough.