"Just like sunrise? Same technically, but sunset's mood different" from the June 15, 1972 Door County Advocate
By RANDALL NICHOLAS
Just like sunrise?
Same technically, but sunset's mood different
By RANDALL NICHOLAS
First, let me clear up a wide-spread misunderstanding. A sunset is in no way like a sunrise. Only a photographer, with a shutter speed of 1-25th of a second, could confuse the sensations of the two. I have heard that these poor people, desensitized by the fast speeds they use to record events, cannot tell the ends of days from the beginnings of days. How could they? Sunsets and sunrises require more than just seeing to be understood; being monumental acts of time, they require watching.
You waste your time watching sunrises, however. To begin with, it is impossible to start early enough: anytime after midnight, light seems to be beginning to bleed palely back inter he East. Once the red-orange is loosed, it does give you color strata in the water, gold-flecked clouds in the sky, and the like; but when the sun itself comes, it just comes, and stays, growing ever more intense, impossible to see. There is no great moment of climax — no "drama" — to a sunrise.
As for sunsets — to insure a "great" performance, you need to cast it over water. Any flat, treeless horizon "will do," but for "spectacle," which is the essence of sunsets, you need water, preferably the calm mirror offered by a lake or bay. Don't worry about staying down on the beach all day, though. Unlike the sunrise, sunsets tell you when they are ready. About an hour after supper, you can see it lining the trees, the leaves, the grass, the wings of insects, a glow of finalizing gold.
Then go, despite the dishes or the television series. Go. Forsake uncomprehending family and friends. Just go wherever there is water in the West, and find a solitary place where you can sit down and watch, and watch to completion. You must not take the time and effort just to get down there and say, "Oh how pretty," and leave. Once seen, the finalizing gold must be trusted, must not be given up on. You create your own sunset, and you have the obligation to yourself and it to do it up right.
You must see it all, all. Clouds — they are there not to obscure but to reveal. When it looks like your sunset is over, it is probably just beginning, the downward glow to flare out through eyes, a mouth, wrinkles of the cloud worn thin; or reflect off dim, unnoticed ones above. You must collect yourself; you must maintain poise against insects; you must sit reverently still; you may speak but only in quiet tones, and with these addressed only to the sunset; you must concentrate your watching intelligence, forebearing indiscriminate looks to left or 'right; you must remain patient until the darkened signal comes for you to leave.
What you shall see then is change. As the sun descends, so it changes, itself, its setting. Clouds glow gold, turn black. Water is stratified, reddens, blues, shoots pins of light, turns dully green. Passing gulls burn white. Your eyes must grow wide: the edges of the setting change fastest of all.
And when the sun is fretting the horizon, when the water with its reflection leaps to join with that unearthly fire, you must watch yet more intensely, not suffering your eyes even to blink, for when the sun goes down, it goes: now fused with the horizon, now halved by it, now razed, leaving behind mere pale remembrance.
Then the signal comes, not as light from a distant beacon, but as darkness close at hand, and the time when you may rise, stand still for a moment, go home.
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
Articles by Randall Nicholas
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/randall-nicholas