The anticipation of sunrise is the anticipation of a world filled in. Colors crawl across the horizon, first richly dark and then jeweled and vibrant, with pale and misty hues counterpointing the drab greys and browns. Listen to the morning birdcalls: the first few drops of sound filling up an empty world. People wake, bleary-eyed, like sculptures shaping themselves out of worn-away rock. Now is the time for articulation.
Beauty in the daytime is celebratory: a festival of figures swaying gently in the breeze, responding hungrily and happily to the warmth and sun. It is collective, it is conversational; the smiling faces are in a discourse with the grass and the scuttling critters, with the fabrics and textures of clothing and buildings alike. Everything yearns and everything moves. The beauty of daytime is the beauty of belonging. It’s the beauty of appreciation. It’s the beauty of home.
The anticipation of sunset is the anticipation of quiet: not a silence, but a pointed deliberation. In the nighttime, everything feels like it is written in code. The everyday vanishes; what remains, therefore, must be deliberate and intent. Light in the night signifies a certain kind of space: the warm and cozy room, the radiant locus of a bonfire, or the city streets, where every neon sign promises potential. In the darkness, every sound seems to swell, as if the entire tapestry of the world was woven out of this note and then this one and then this one, offering the answer to every question, the reason for every why.
Beauty in the night is intimate and mysterious; the sweep of dark eliminates dimensions, dissolves walls, and whatever remains may as well be infinite. A silhouette or a shadow can mean more than a whole; an ocean of dancing bodies melts away amidst the piercing strobe of a light. A whisper or a murmur suggests a landscape. Close your eyes, and a few simple words could mean the world.
The romance of seen and the romance of unseen; the intrigue of the finished painting, and the intrigue of the blank canvas. Here is the part where we knew everything to be true, and knew ourselves, and knew each other. Here is the part where nothing made sense, we didn’t want sense, and our wonder was of a wholly different sort. Eyes open, eyes closed, we fell in love; and we wondered, as that fiery orange line on the horizon faded to nothing and grew to swallow everything in sight, how what we loved in the morning and what we loved in the evening could possibly be the same. And we wondered whether that, too, was an illusion, whether the things in the day and the things in the night—places and moments, you and me—might not be the same things at all.