Sunsets and Other Transitories

Tonight I was walking back to Gregory Hall with Scott Laverick. As we went, we both noticed a slightly pale sunset, visible from the parking lot above Gregory. My inclination was to say "nice" and continue walking, but (fortunately) Scott decided to stop and look for a while, so I did the same.

As I said, this particular sunset started out rather modestly: a neat band of orange along the horizon, and higher up a nice swath of pale blue in an opening in the stormclouds. As we watched, however, the sun's position grew obvious due to a misty rose-coloured cloud growing toward the left of the entire scheme. As the sun dropped further, the low-lying clouds grew more livid, glowing fiercely at the rims as the magenta haze intensified. Finally the clouds split imperceptibly, allowing a perfect spectrum of individual orange rays to burst through. The lower clouds were illuminated most brilliantly, bathed in orange and magenta aurae, while the scattered clouds higher up were brightened in lower degrees -- though they were still very bright. For a few moments, the entire campus lit up with the orange reflections on the clouds overhead. Then the blaze was over, and the clouds, which now had the look of magma, smouldered to a milder pink and finally yeilded to the grays of night.

Now, Scott and I watched several people come by and photograph the sight several times, and no doubt they will look over those pictures later -- perhaps even years from now -- and recall the brilliant sight with awe. Nevertheless, the horizon is far too large to be contained in a photographic lens; and besides, the continual changes and gradations of light provided the most spectacular elements of the sunset, and those could not be caught even in a series of photographs. Again, a video camera could catch the gradations, but not the scope. Even a conflation of many video images projected upon a sophisticated IMAX screen would not be able to capture the same experience. Who, in any case, would pay to watch a sunset on a video screen?

All this lead me to one conclusion: though we desire with all our being to catch fleeting moments like the deliate light-changes of a sunset, they can only be experienced once, in a single time span, and we must take them on their own terms -- this includes not only patiently waiting for the most brilliant colours to emerge, but also accepting the comforting darkness when it descends. Assiduously as we try, we cannot force eternity upon such an event; it simply will not be held down. It refuses our every attempt to extend its life beyond the natural course. This is such with many things in our experience -- the most salient being human life itself. Apparently, any attempt to force artificial eternity on mortal phenomena results in a tragic dimunition -- or mutilation -- of the phenomena. Thus, any human tonic of eternal youth is to be shunned. For literary understandings of this truth, think of the Ring of Power in Tolkien or the bodiless head in That Hideous Strength.

Perhaps this is just the nature of things; perhaps God just wishes to sternly remind us that our counterfeits of His greatest gift are miserable and tragic in comparison to the original. Not that this should lead us to a morbid fixation on death, but rather to an acceptance that mortal things indeed have a beginning and an end -- and to a firm decrying of modernist dreams of extending life indefinitely through material means. Though life is an amazing gift, prologing it unnaturally can only spread it so thinly that it can barely hold. Thank God for the real eternal life that brings only bliss.