One of the best things about winter is the sunsets. In the summertime, when the air’s soupy and thick, the horizon is often fuzzed out by a skein of haze. The sunsets can be nice, sure, but nothing like what’s available in January and February. This time of year the air is usually thin and clean and cold and the western sky blazes with aching 20-20 clarity.
I watched one, recently, while walking out of the sugarbush on a brutally cold day. At first the setting sun was like a bare lightbulb, and everything around was sand colored and harsh, though if you looked to the east the first stars were burning through a deep royal blue. Then the top of the ridge turned hard orange and the valley floor turned purple and the light moved down until the trees in front of me were black on account of the color leaking between their branches and trunks.
The clouds were the best part, of course. In the east they floated, cottony and misshapen, redolent of battle ships or strange prehistoric birds. In the west, they massed around the horizon in horizontal formations, cleaved like layers of shale. First they had white-hot bottoms and onyx tops, then they morphed until they resembled the glowing embers in a fire, until finally, in the pink stage, they trolled slowly across the horizon like a pastel magma flow.
There’s something so drop-everything-and-look about January sunsets, perhaps because we’re so starved for color these days. And ogling one can reverberate through your life if you let it. It’s sort of like a gateway drug – you take one and the next thing you know you’re staring at a snowflake on your hand like it’s a tiny Picasso.
I had a friend who was a poet and she used to always tell me that after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species he stayed up at night thinking about human eyes. Despite having faith in his scientific observations, he still couldn’t imagine how something as complicated as the human eye could evolve through natural selection. You don’t have to be a poet to imagine him overmatched by the colored swirls in his wife Emma’s irises, her pupils as they shrunk to pin-holes or swelled like moons.
The point is that it’s easy to feel like Darwin when you watch a sunset in January. I’m not a particularly religious man. And I understand the physics of atmospheric color variations as well as any layman can. But there’s still something impossibly beautiful in a January sunset that I can’t begin to wrap my mind around. There’s nothing in my education that can explain why that collective grandeur, why that resonance. No matter who we are, or what religion we practice, I think nature unifies us as people of faith – if not faith in a specific God, then at least faith in a humbled, mystic sense. We watch the sun fall and feel utterly dominated by the spectacle. I think this is very important.
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