sol

The clarity of light over the river after sunset two days after the solstice, even in these southern latitudes, throws the the trees, the moored riverboats, the bridges and houses over the bluffs into sharp focus. Abandoned industrial buildings still haunting the city’s shore are backlit in the glow, sunset hues reflect off dark water and onto the flat bases of cumulous clouds to the east, eliciting a breath of disorientation. The curve of the earth suddenly seems small from this late vantage.

The water changes quickly and imperceptibly from the bright blue-grey under summer sunlight to the deep charcoal-grey of dusk, losing contrast as the light tilts up and away with the spin of the planet. Streetlights blink on, somehow bright even in the deep golden hour light still highlighting every edge, every leaf, every ripple.

In Galileo’s time, there was fierce debate about the nature of the milky way. The sky was so awash with stars, the earth so devoid of manmade light, that the strip of night sky looked to the naked eye like a single entity – one bright source and not a hundred billion individual pinpoints in the dark. Yet the character of cyclic illumination that our small, local sun provides has been consistent for every generation of humankind that has walked the surface of our world. For all our innovation, invention and progress as a species, daylight remains the exclusive purview of our star.