A Moment, The Sun Was Different

July 28, 2008

On my way to the doctor this morning up Washington Street, watching pedestrians in sarongs and suits standing on either side of me passing. The sun suddenly looked different. Like the opposite of a blink, more light than ever. Not right for ten in the morning in July. Not the same, like hard white gold and pinpoint illuminating. As if it were being reflected and condensed off of thin sheets of platinum.

They didn’t seem to notice, the downtown-outside-people who had suddenly started glowing white and gold, but I did. For a moment I started thinking about a short story once read to me at night in an apartment, Larry Niven’s Inconstant Moon. Wondering if something had just gone supernova, perhaps these were the last few seconds of known life and these were the shimmery things I was seeing. Waiting for nuclei to disintegrate, for matter to end.

Then the light–the one that indicates go-and-stop–turned an appropriate shade for continuing and the sun’s metamorphosis took a back seat to my consternation about finding parking. These are the losses we suffer every day to the distractions of reality.

One Comment

  1. Mom says:

    I, too, noticed special light, but on Tuesday afternoon. It was a function of the rain, I think, clearing the air, but the greenery in the Park Blocks had the special definition that I associate with very high-end optics. The space looked too special to walk through.
    But the effect you describe–maybe it was like the disk being opaque and easy to look at. But that would be too synchronous with my understanding of the mass viewing at Fatima in 1917, the subject of a book I’m copy editing. Everyone assembled there thought they could look directly at the sun without being blinded, and it danced.

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