Thinking About Light
In 'Real City', D.J. Waldie wrote,
“[Lawrence] Weschler was thinking how the light in L.A. is a substance, and how it doesn’t mark time but suspends it. He was thinking of a luminous, dense fluid, more permanent than the buildings themselves. He was thinking of the passage of pedestrians and cars through this light and how it admitted and ignored them equally.
When he asked me what I thought of the light in L.A., I added only one detail – the light, clear as stone-dry champagne, after a full day of rain. ‘Everything in that light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized,’ I told him. ‘And that’s the light that breaks hearts in L.A.’”
Today is not one of those days of stone-dry light. I woke this morning to the wet slate of the marine layer, the thick fogs that come in off the ocean during the winter and linger well into the afternoon. When the sun does break through, it is almost unlooked for, as though the streets had forgotten the words to a song they suddenly remembered the melody of. Walking west this afternoon, there was something hazy and softened about the light. Not the hard clear light of the real, but a kind of softened truth to everything: mothers walking their small sons home from the elementary school, carrying their sons' backpacks blazoned with super heroes; the long corridors of Venice and Washington receding west into the gloss of the western sky; shadows not dark but almost impossibly light, as though this city really was but thinly laid upon the earth. I'm not certain that the light ignores everyone equally - that would be a little too terrifying for me to reckon with. But there is something to the apparent unconcern with which afternoons pass into the evening: the light lingers as it will, makes distance light and holds out the possibility of grace, suspended somewhere.
“[Lawrence] Weschler was thinking how the light in L.A. is a substance, and how it doesn’t mark time but suspends it. He was thinking of a luminous, dense fluid, more permanent than the buildings themselves. He was thinking of the passage of pedestrians and cars through this light and how it admitted and ignored them equally.
When he asked me what I thought of the light in L.A., I added only one detail – the light, clear as stone-dry champagne, after a full day of rain. ‘Everything in that light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized,’ I told him. ‘And that’s the light that breaks hearts in L.A.’”
Today is not one of those days of stone-dry light. I woke this morning to the wet slate of the marine layer, the thick fogs that come in off the ocean during the winter and linger well into the afternoon. When the sun does break through, it is almost unlooked for, as though the streets had forgotten the words to a song they suddenly remembered the melody of. Walking west this afternoon, there was something hazy and softened about the light. Not the hard clear light of the real, but a kind of softened truth to everything: mothers walking their small sons home from the elementary school, carrying their sons' backpacks blazoned with super heroes; the long corridors of Venice and Washington receding west into the gloss of the western sky; shadows not dark but almost impossibly light, as though this city really was but thinly laid upon the earth. I'm not certain that the light ignores everyone equally - that would be a little too terrifying for me to reckon with. But there is something to the apparent unconcern with which afternoons pass into the evening: the light lingers as it will, makes distance light and holds out the possibility of grace, suspended somewhere.
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