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Civil Twilight

2017-07-04 · letter vlog · John · 3:01 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Science & nature (also: History & curiosities) · mode: Personal essay · tags: on location

On vacation by Lake Michigan, John reflects on sunsets and civil twilight: their beauty is cliché yet universal, the physics of scattering does not rob them of beauty but cannot convey the feeling, and, echoing Toni Morrison, the world's beauty can simply be enough without being photographed.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Vacation on Lake Michigan; the phrase 'civil twilight' and the burglary law behind it

  • ★ John is on vacation on the shores of Lake Michigan. — 00:00:01
  • ★★ John says the first half hour or so after sunset is called civil twilight because some governments consider it legally still daytime. (hedged) — 00:00:05
  • ★★ Centuries ago nighttime burglary was often punished more severely than daytime burglary, so criminals sometimes sought lesser sentences by claiming they robbed during civil twilight. — 00:00:14
  • ★ John loves the phrase 'civil twilight': the adjective 'civil' makes almost every noun better, except war. (playful) — 00:00:25

00:00:29 — Michigan sunsets: cliché, E. E. Cummings' sunset poem, and the universality of a beautiful sunset

  • ★★ Sunsets in Michigan are so ostentatiously beautiful that they are ordinary there, unlike back home in Indiana, where the light just gets grayer until dark. — 00:00:31 · Indiana
  • ★★ John says the beauty of sunsets and civil twilight is by now so cliché that it is hard to say anything interesting about them. — 00:00:48
  • ★★ John loves E. E. Cummings' sunset poem but says it works only because it is set in childhood, before one realises how lame it is to write about sunsets. — 00:01:09
  • ★★★ A good sunset is universally beautiful: our ancestors lived very differently, but every human who has lived a few years has paused at a beautiful sunset, grateful and overwhelmed. — 00:01:16

00:01:43 — Sunsets in cold facts: scattering of light in the atmosphere

  • ★★ Sunlight is scattered by molecules in the atmosphere; at sunset it travels through more atmosphere, so much of the blue and purple is scattered away before reaching us. — 00:01:46

00:02:07 — Science does not rob beauty; the camera cannot capture it; smallness, gratitude, Toni Morrison and turning off the camera; sign-off

  • ★★★ John finds it helpful to know how sunsets work and has never bought the romantic notion that scientific understanding robs the universe of its beauty. (hedged) — 00:02:07
  • ★★ The science still doesn't convey how it felt to see an ordinary but beautiful civil twilight; John tried to photograph it, but the camera, and his voiceover, could not capture it. — 00:02:14
  • ★★★ Sometimes the world stops John cold and he feels his smallness, which does not make him sad but grateful. — 00:02:36
  • ★★★ Citing Toni Morrison, John says that at some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough: you need not photograph, paint or even remember it. — 00:02:45
  • ★★ So John turned off his camera, and it was enough. — 00:02:55

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Mentioned

Central: civil twilight · sunset

Also: E. E. Cummings · gratitude · Indiana · Lake Michigan · Michigan · Rayleigh scattering · Toni Morrison · who are you,little i

Only in the description or credits: Great Lakes

Also centred on sunset: Savoring: The Sunset Series Returns

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