I think there is something quite steadying about the sunrise. There is a brief, primeval moment every morning when all things are silent and the world itself seems to be an aching parody of its own construction. For a moment, all else is subjugated under its umber majesty. All wickedness and greed is illuminated for the day. There is something deeply important in all this, but it is difficult to entirely apprehend. I think perhaps it is that this sunrise could be anybody's - Homer's, Virgil's, Shakespeare's; there is, in something so decidedly non-human, a humanism and connection with all mankind. It is the only time I am truly hopeful. Something both so fleeting and universal seems too profound to ignore. There is the brief misapprehension in the beholder of this mute spectacle that everything is possible and all is life. All nature is sublimated in some benign warmth, as if everything has been designed to be looked upon only in the morning.
Besides all this, the sunrise itself is rather beautiful. Clouds huddle around the horizon, billowing like torrents of whipped cream. A flamelike glow begins to imbue the air itself with divinity, and presages the arrival of the protagonist in this ignored play. The clouds commingle with the flames, that they might subdue their grandeur, and a colossal elemental fugue holds sway over all things for mere minutes. Groundlings are irradiated with grace as the two abstracts coil round one another in monstrous counterpoint. Neither faction wins, but why should one? This is, after all, a grossly human concept. There is something beautiful in the indifference of nature - man's indifference, on the other hand, is not indifference at all, rather a languid mask on hostility or emotional ignorance.
Then, like an ethereal monarch addressing a mumbling crowd, the sun rears up and all is serene. Some unearthly ataraxy extinguishes all rebellion. A brief few minutes follow, where the sun makes its address, and all things make sense. The world, the obdurate world filled with so much misery, is heaved together in one reluctant lurch, and sits in harmony for a while, until its dull components find an excuse to slip out of the nearest exit and go back to their toil. The sun is pulled from its bed, as with an impossible vacuum, and time resumes.
I enjoy all of this. Presently, however, I feel like I might weep. There is some dreadful machinery gnashing away at galvanised steel, screaming imprecations with its industrial larynx. I find nothing beautiful here, but more than this there is some kind of idiotic, human ignorance towards this grand spectacle unravelling behind it - it is the indifference I mentioned earlier. Worse still than this, the human indifference in the pursuit of money - building grotesque crypts for monetary gain - has blocked my view of the sunrise. All near me is grey, reconstituted sludge: Lovecraftian horrors frozen into place by chemicals. This was almost intolerable, but I still had the sunrise to look on. I had a view, above a car park, of fields rolling into the distance, sealed at the edges with grand hills. There was some vicarious freedom in this. I used to be able to observe the sunrise, imbibe its stillness, forget the quotidian, demotic nonsense man buries himself in. It was only for a short moment, but it was enough. Now it is as if the economic system itself is resolved to destroy me. I'm locked in a grey quadrangle, and I feel like screaming with the machinery which made it happen.
The only time I might observe the sun is at midday, when it has reached a far more punitive stature, searing its victims with infernal beams. The day has begun, people are moving around, and I am not interested in this state at all.
There is something wholly transcendent about the sunrise, which I now must cease to observe. People might laugh at ancient civilisations who worshipped the sun as some incredible demiurge which brought prosperity, but I think this is preferable by far to what we have today. Besides, if we actually looked on the sunrise, we might come to a similar conclusion. But no - we are far too busy for such trivialities! Money must be made! This is the most delirious notion man has yet created, an endless hurricane of prosperity which will make us happy, won't it? We may mock belief, but all we believe in today is money. The desk is the prayer mat and the central bank is the pulpit. We're baptised in an illusion of wealth, that we might gain a taste for it. Then crowd the earth with dull buildings, nothing else is important. For me the occlusion of the sunrise has been the occlusion of the soul.
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