Sunsets and Time

 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.)

A View Without a Price Tag

The two things I remember most about the incident are a color and the movement of the people.

The color was beautiful and intense -- a pinkish, slightly purplish red.  I had never seen a sunset in which the color was more vivid.  Nor a sunset that covered such a vast portion of sky as this one did.  It felt as if it filled the entire western half of heaven.

The other thing I remember about the incident is the people.  I saw them silhouetted against the sky.  There were at least a dozen of them, and they were walking.

But here is what struck me:  Not a single person paused or even turned their head to look at the sunset.  They were instead all intent on their shopping expeditions as they walked from their vehicles to the mall, or from the mall back to their vehicles in the parking lot.  To all of them, it was if this gorgeous sunset -- a surge of redness with rippling clouds -- simply did not exist.  I do not mean to judge the people; I do not know the details of their shopping errands.  But I felt as if they were missing something that was more valuable than what is usually in most of our shopping bags.

Our society in the U.S. today seems more and more to tag us as consumers.  We may be hopelessly divided along Democrat-Republican lines, but we all shop.  Even during a recession, a question frequently asked on the news is whether or not we have begun shopping more again so as to stimulate the economy.

However, there seems to me to be a tension between basing one's sense of self on the ability to buy more desirable products, and placing ones trust and sense of wonder upon a divine Power that was around before there was human civilization.  This is why I am revived by turning my attention to Nature.

garden at
Wordsworth's childhood home

The poet William Wordsworth detected the negative connection between consumerism and an attention to Nature when, in his poem "The World Is Too Much With Us" he wrote:

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours."

Some of my happiest childhood memories are not of being in a shopping mall, but instead sitting with my family on a high lookout in Madison, Wisconsin, watching the sun slowly set.   Simply doing that provided something valuable my parents could never have bought.

~~~

Do you have a childhood memory of Nature?  Do you think there is a relationship between our society's attitudes towards Nature and toward consumer goods?

(To read Wordsworth's complete poem,

 click here: "The World Is Too Much With Us")