Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Soon the sun itself disappears completely. But it still shines a bit on the clouds, and then colors the heavens with its rainbow play: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet--as optics teach us. But we can't be bothered with science. For us the rainbow is the bridge of the gods; the earth is flat as a pancake, the sea without end. How the sun gets from west to east is its own affair. We just wish it good night and good morning. We don't count stamens, and we don't pull sepals apart. We think of flowers only as blue or yellow and birds according to their songs. Night climbs up from the east, and the glimmer of light in the west pushes further and further down and around to the north. The bats come out and gambol in the air, a solitary pointed-winged sandpiper streaks whiningly along the shoreline. The first star is lit, and so the hunter cocks his gun.
--Wilhelm Dinesen, "Letters from the Hunt"

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