Capturing a Cliché

#21 In the sunset of my life

My Geriatric Journal #21

Golden sunsets for my golden years? Dear journal, let me pour on the clichés today. Sunset photos are a dime a dozen (see?). Virtually everyone with a camera (in my day) or the ubiquitous camera phone (today) will aim it at a sizzling sun and its dazzling scattering of light sooner or later — mostly sooner. I know this as a former editor of a destination magazine — my optic nerves may have been permanently damaged from looking at sunshots. I have nothing against spectacular sunsets. When an exceptional one occurs, I stand in awe of its immense beauty.

But you can’t contain it. It’s impossible. The only thing you can do is flatten it into two dimensions and crop it to fit into your phone, on your screen or a print. But if you capture it well, you can arrest the inexorable movement of time, keep the sun from setting, keep life from ending: for what is a sunset but a termination?

“Nothing in life is guaranteed. You can’t predict how many days you’ll have on this Earth, how many more sunsets you’ll be here to see. I want you to make me a promise. Always watch the sunset….” ― Jessica Prince, Scattered Colors

I do. Even though I know I am watching the curtain being drawn.

OK, you may say, there is always a new day rising from the ashes of the night to ignite the morning. (Why, then, are sunrises less dramatic and why are they less witnessed and photographed than sunsets?) Do others — when they see the earth in its relentless rotation obliterate the sun — also think of death? If I do, am I a pessimist?

There is that annoying fact that a good sunset depends on bad weather: the stormier the clouds the more impressive the panoply of light and color. Is that a metaphor? Are the colors of life saturated (as in the photography term) and refracted by conflict, by sadness, by suffering, by pain?

We all know we have a finite number of sunsets to squeeze into our viewfinders. Each one may be the last or it may just be one more to load onto our disk of momentary memories.

If I play my cards right, I won’t run out of paper (or hard disk space) before I bite the bullet.

Sometimes a great sunset can be a bolt from the blue, a dish for the gods, a picture worth a thousands words. (You knew I’d throw in more clichés with your sunsets, right?)

To adequately describe such a dramatic celestial event is as difficult as taking a shot in the dark and hitting a bullseye. Then why do I (and just about every writer and photographer) try to write about, or worse, try to capture, sunbeams with their hands?

Because I have reached the stage in my life (eight decades!) where the last sunset is a just stone’s throw away. Maybe I’m seeking a last hurrah?

Is it blasphemy to mock beauty? I think so. When I look at these photos I see a talisman, a charm, a celestial light that reveals they are a shattering shard of magnificence in our brief life on earth.

To photograph a sunset is to click a cliché. But at the end of the day, no one knows what lies beyond. What am I — what are we all — but a scattering of light?

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