Staring at the sun, I only noticed the overall compositions, the framing. But there, do you see what I didn't notice?
It's the schooner! Right there in the sun's reflection on the water. We've been talking about the schooner all day. And here it is, magically sailing in my sunset photos.
Your emotional blogger breaks down and cries.
And then I wonder, will my readers tire of all these sunset photos? Why aren't we enraptured by every sunset -- and every schooner?
Why, if we've tired of sunsets and schooners, do we still hope for eternal life?
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All three are beautiful - actually, the first so much so that I've finally replaced my wallpaper, which had for a long time been one of your photos from Arches.
Check for an albatross. It's a sign of death by rationalism.
Wow... really nice.
Thanks.
I didn't really do anything with these.
At the point when the third photo was taken, I could hear applause. I think it was people over on the promenade, applauding the sunset!
Sunset with a schooner? I thought white wine was your beverage of choice?
Beautiful shots. Oops, that's whiskey, isn't it? Hey it's Friday.
Thanks you for sharing your sunset.
Ann asks,
"Why aren't we enraptured by every sunset?"
C. S. Lewis enters the discussion:
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening -- any evening -- would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
(Read The Whole Thing™)
OK, for those who are perhaps too busy to RTWT, I should have at least included the 2nd half of the opening stanza:
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
My wife and I honeymooned in Ixtapa Mexico (two decades ago). The hotel faced due west. Every night, everyone gathered at the bar to watch the sun set, and every night there was applause.
Outstanding!
Ah! the pig-tailed, quidding pirates and the pretty pranks we played,
All have since been put a stop to by the naughty Board of Trade;
The schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest,
A little south the sunset in the islands of the Blest.
Masefield, A Ballad of John Silver
I get weary and sick of trying,
I'm tired of living and feared of dying,
But old man river he just keep rolling along.*
*I could have substituted schooner for river and sailing for rolling but that would have been too itsy cutesy. Anyway, I think this great Oscar Hammerstein lyric is the appropriate response when folks start waxing philosophic.
At my parents' west-facing place in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico (a house we've had for 52 years), whoever's there is out on the beach watching the sunset every night with a glass of bourbon or wine. And no two are ever alike. At some point my father was appointed Director of Sunsets. He's 89 and he isn't tired of them yet.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Well, I'll be the one to be both obvious and slightly OT.
Eternal things, dawn to dusk.
I don't tire of this view. Keep photographing it every day so we too can share the view.
It's ok to break down and cry Althouse.
And those liberals say us republicans don't have feelings. We cry too.
That's another liberal myth that republicans are cold and don't care. I wish we could somehow change that myth.
titus...i wish you republicans could too...so trying not being so cold and try caring. works wonders.
ann is a pretty good human being, sensitive to the world around her and she sees it well. sometimes the scene is so poignant or beautiful to bring tears. nothing wrong with that...in fact it is a too little used state of mind.
"Lucy, Linus and Charlie Brown were looking at clouds. Linus said one formation reminded him of Steven being stoned in the Bible, another reminded him of British Honduras, and another reminded him of the sculptor Thomas Ekins. When Lucy asked Charlie Brown what he saw, he said, "I was going to say I saw a duck and a horsie, but I changed my mind."
Althouse, if you are looking for a good show go see Richard Prince; Spiritual America at the Guggenheim-it is amazing.
Thanks, Titus. I definitely will.
Very nice shots.
An interesting series of shots would be sunsets through the winter with the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan framing the right side of the picture. That way we could see the steady march of the Sun as the seasons change.
This schooner - keeps sailing past your apartment block in the evening when people are getting showered and dressed for dinner eh?
I'd have it checked for telescopes. Those pervies are everywhere!
And then I wonder, will my readers tire of all these sunset photos? Why aren't we enraptured by every sunset -- and every schooner?
I'll never tire of them. My work tends to take me past dark, so I rarely get to see one "in person;" And your photography is excellent as alwayas.
We aren't enraptured by a sunset, unless it's an authentic one viewed only in the West.
The East is about sun rises. Althouse has been gypped. They should have given her an East-facing view so she could view an authentic East coast sun-rise.
Don't you love the word "gypped" ??
This is the kind of bitter post one makes when people are being beastly soppy about a perfectly ordinary natural phenomenon, such as the visual effect of the refraction of sunlight through the Earth's atmosphere, as it - the Earth and not the Sun - rolls round in its implaccable diurnal course [see Wordsworth passim], at a time when one is howling with the unrelenting pain of a dental abscess and feeling totally twisted about the very fact of existence, never mind that there are certain pink bits in it that turn people to so much dopey goo.
I can't be arsed to take the trouble to spell it out, so go read the third book of the 'Gormenghast' trilogy, where you will find a witless tribe of people who have surrendered all useful purpose in life for a daily gathering on the cliff's edge to watch one more spectacular sunset, where they sit swopping comparative notes as to whether or not tonight's offering is quite as beautiful - or as frigging pink - as last Thursday's for example.
Titus naturally flees in horror at the essential lifelessness of it and them.
I think.
Because it is some thirty years or more since I read the books and my temper is not improved in noting that I shall have to read all three volumes before bed tonight in order to satisfy myself on the context within the books.
There are no sunsets for a man with toothache. (That's the bit Plato missed out, which to me tonight consigns him to the dung heap of utter useless ignorance.)
I think I'll change my screen background from your lotuses to the schooner. Beautiful!
"Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"
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