You can’t see the sunset from my apartment. The majority of the windows face east, which means they provide gorgeous light in the morning, but no sunset viewing opportunities. I do not blame them for this. The morning sun allows for a very relaxing morning. The main west facing windows look out on to our backyard. They sit in a tiny all-purpose backroom. My girlfriend and I put a lot of our big pieces of recycling in there. While these windows face the right direction for prime sunset viewing, a large tree blocks the ability to fully glimpse the rapidly darkening sky. This tree does not piss me off. It provides copious amounts of shade, shade which makes our backyard habitable even during the hottest of Chicago summer days. A true blessing for social distancing. So, I do not resent that tree. For thirty minutes a day however, somewhere between 5-9:30pm depending on the time of year, I do imagine what it would be like to have an uninterrupted view of the sunset.
Sunsets, solis occasum in case you needed the Latin for whatever reason, encapsulate the idea of beauty. They have inspired poets, painters, songwriters, novelists, musicians, and every other stripe of artist you can imagine. A wonderful metaphor, literary device, and an easy cue for movie editors, the sunset is an all-purpose artistic tool. If I had the guts to act as a betting man, I’d place a large wager that everyone who has an Instagram account has at least one picture of a sunset on their grid. I’ve certainly taken hundreds of them, none of them good. My iPhone does not take good photos of sunsets, and I have neither the time nor money to get a good camera and learn how to capture that particular light. Fortunately, I do have my eyes.
The greatest sunsets I’ve witnessed happened over a Great Lake. I’m blanking on which one in particular. I think Huron or Erie. (Edit: My parents have informed me it was Lake Superior). In any case, one summer, a family friend had allowed us the use of their lake house for a few days. (Another Edit: My parents also informed me that we rented it. I’m very dumb). The back of the house faced west over the water, meaning that every night my brother, mom, and dad gathered on the balcony like so many worshippers and watched the sun dip below the horizon. Deep purples, light pinks, and even occasional light wispy greens filled the sky. Reds, blues, yellows and oranges rounded out the starburst of color. The clouds that dotted the sky gave the sunsets what the owners of the lake house called “chutzpah.” The reflected the light in odd and arcane ways, creating new colors, patterns, and combinations that varied from minute to minute, hour to hour and day to day. Those sunsets filled the world with beauty.
I want to find a better word than beautiful or beauty for what I witnessed those few days. I googled “beautifil syonnyms” and got “attractive,” “pretty,” handsome,” “prepossessing,” and as pretty as a picture” back. None of these really work. “Pulchritudinous” also showed up, and while I do not want to argue about its usefulness, it does not exactly give off sunset vibes. It gives off more “sepulcher” vibes than anything else. Not something that I associate with either beauty or sunsets. Beautiful, like genius, or insane gets over used, and in a lot of ways doesn’t really describe anything. Saying something is beautiful, while an easy short cut, doesn’t really mean anything. So many people have so many different definitions of beauty, that the word doesn’t summon up a consistent specific image. Someone might think of a perfectly prepared pierogi, someone else might imagine the Golden Gate Bridge, a third mystery person might visualize the wild rose in the empty lot owned by Turtle Bay Condominiums as seen in the Stephen King novel, The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands. I stretched a bit for that last example, but you get the point. Beautiful doesn’t conjure up the same image for everyone. I don’t think a word, or even a string of words, can do that.
The problem with that vagueness comes from the fact that I want to share those sunsets with people. But sunsets are hard. Despite their ubiquity in the world, everyone has a different idea of what they look like. Similar to telling someone the thing you dreamed about last night, telling someone about the sunset you saw the day before always falls flat. In part it’s due to a lacking in the English language, but it’s also in part due to the emotional content of the sunset. Describing a sunset as just a bunch of colors does not do it justice. As with the best art, sunsets tie into emotion as well. A good sunset tugs on your heart strings. That’s what beauty means for me. It ties aesthetics to emotion, creating a resonance beyond the two. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, to steal a phrase. Perhaps there is a way to describe those sunsets, and I’m just not the one to do it. I think however, that writing cannot ever truly capture the nature of a sunset. And that’s fine. The attempt of sharing that beauty is enough, the act of trying in and of itself is beautiful. Wanting to share sunsets with other people is a part of its pulchritudinous essence. It is not a secret beauty, hidden away from the rest of the world, for only a select few to see. It is not a beauty that begs to be locked up, remembered only by one. It is a beauty that begs to be shared, to be broadcast on every frequency, wavelength, and medium. It shouts to the world, “I AM BEAUTIFUL,” and wants to be heard. It’s our job to amplify that voice, to share it at length. Even if we don’t have exactly the right words for it.
I don’t have anything deeper than that. Other than that sunsets are beautiful. And we all should try to take a look at them whenever we can.
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