How do you bring a successful TV series to an end before it is canceled or, perhaps even worse, before it loses its glow? That was the challenge the PBS producers of the Inspector Morse mystery series had to deal with. The grumpy, somewhat elderly detective Morse had warmed his way into so many viewer's hearts that the writers had to figure out an acceptable way of having him die in the last show, rather than leaving viewers hanging with an open-ended story line. But how could the death be handled delicately? Interestingly, part of the writers solution was to use a touching scene at sunset (days before Morse's demise) to reflect upon the meaning of human mortality.
Sunsets have on a number of occasions been a means for writers to touch on the challenge of perishability. And also to touch on truths about time -- for, after all, nothing can stop that incorrigible movement of the sun in the sky, day after day. Sometimes the sunset metaphor can be pessimistic. Such as when the late-19th-century writer H.G. Wells, in his book The Time Machine, has his lead character journey to the years 802,701 and beyond. There he encounters a dystopian world and "the sunset of mankind."
But to me it is in a way ironical that a sunset should become the metaphor for a dark vision of the future. Even though it is true that sunsets proceed the darkness of night, I have found that when people do have an emotional reaction to sunsets, they almost invariably find them to be beautiful. That is noteworthy because we live in an age in which we often dismiss beauty as being something merely subjective—something merely "in the eye of the beholder." However, the writer Crispin Sartwell points out regarding our judgments about beauty that:
"Though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments,
it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent:
it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that
a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful."
What did Sartwell choose as one of his two examples to demonstrate that judgments of beauty are not merely subjective? A sunset!
Nevertheless, our urbanized and technologized lives make it harder to enjoy sunsets. Buildings can block our view. And prime-time TV draws us indoors to watch an electronic screen rather than look out a window.
Beyond its beautiful colors, there is something else we might gain from watching a sunset. In our modern, technologized lives, time has become mathematical -- broken up into smaller and smaller measured units. Even though today's clocks (being more often electronic instead of mechanical) no longer produce the sound of "tick, tock, tick, tock," they still measure off the seconds. Almost every computer carries a mathematical representation of the current time in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. But the mathematical model for time is artificial because we do not actually experience time as equal tiny units. Instead, we experience events that have a duration. If we did not experience duration, we would not be able to hear the melody of a line of music; we would hear only separate notes. If we did not experience duration, we would not be able to make sense of a spoken sentence; we would hear only isolated words one after another.
Thus it is that watching a sunset, besides slowing us down, can bring us back to the way that our lives are a part of the natural world. For, as the environmental and spiritual writer Bill McKibben wrote:
"The most fascinating thing about dusk
is the lack of demarcation.
It’s one long smooth transition."
~ ~ ~
(Do you remember watching a sunset? When? Where? What was it like?)
(The quotation by Sartwell is from his entry on “Beauty” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. © 2016. pp. 1 & 2.)(The quotation by McKibben is from his book The Age of Missing Information, © 1992, p. 148.)
