Light Traces

8. The Light Spread of Time

8 The Light Spread of Time 69 The day is exquisite as it spreads its light over the entire valley. The scattered clouds are as brilliantly white as the sky is intensely blue. From this brilliance and intensity along with the sharpness with which the clouds are outlined against the sky, it can be seen that the air, at this moment, is exceptionally transparent, utterly diaphanous. The phenomenon is remarkable: the transparent air can, in this sense, be seen–directly, not by way of inference–even though it is not itself seen, not seen as such. It appears precisely in remaining the invisible, perfect medium of another appearing. It comes to light, not by reflecting light, as do things, but by giving free passage to light. Visibility, it appears, is not limited to visible things but can be bestowed on something invisible in and of itself, indeed in such a way that precisely its invisibility is what comes to light. The clouds drift slowly along, their shapes gradually transforming as they become more airy and expansive or contract into denser forms, Münstertal Baden June 70 LIGHT TR ACES also as they extend wispy appendages toward other forms, some slowly merging, some separating into new shapes, in a play of resolution and dissolution that contests the very category of individuality. Nothing illustrates more concretely and immaculately the sense of drift than this light, airy show of forms. The play requires for its stage only the absolutely immobile diurnal sky. Yet the uniformity of the sky prevents it from providing a measure for the movement; it merely forms the expanse on which the drifting clouds can be observed in relation to each other. Most of the clouds are gathered just above the ridge that bounds the valley on the north side. A pine forest stretches up the mountainside to the ridge; moreover, many of the trees on the upper slope are of such height that their tops extend above the ridge itself. Thus the contour that marks the upper bound of the mountainside is provided, in effect, with a series of vertical measuring rods in relation to which a trained eye can readily gauge the drift of the clouds. It is as if calibration had been inscribed by nature in this region where the dense forest and rocky mountainside give way to light, to open air, and to sky. Time is everywhere. Its ubiquity is not only like that of the day, spread evenly over everything; the spread is also such that time is lightly, unobtrusively marked, that it leaves its trace, amidst all things as well as in regions defined not primarily by things but by the elements, indeed most conspicuously in these regions. It is marked in the drift of the light clouds along the ridge; and the natural measure provided by the protruding treetops is, in effect, to the trained eye, a kind of natural clock. The forest, too, bears its trace of time: set against the heavier, darker growth that has endured the winter, the abundance 71 THE LIGHT SPREAD OF TIME of fresh, light green with which the pines are now decorated bespeaks the advent of early summer. The intensely blue, cloudless sky overhead offers a visible promise of several hours of sunshine to come. Yet in the air there is a hint–ever so slight–of a change that late afternoon may bring, a hint that is conveyed–ever so slightly–to our sensing. It would be difficult to say how it is conveyed: perhaps by the slightest of scents, by a scent so light and so momentary that one would have no sense of its origin; perhaps by the delicate feel of slightly cooler, slightly moist air on the skin–in any case by sensings that cannot be readily accommodated to the conventional concepts of the five senses. For this reason, the doubly vague concept of feeling is readily introduced to describe such sensing. Yet to those fully acclimated to this region, it is anything but vague; rather, it portends–as definitely as portentions allow–a thunderstorm to come. Animals often feel such portentions much more intensely than do humans and much farther in advance of the occasion portended. When our weaker premonition hardly senses at all what is to come, the behavior even of a domesticated animal–the nervous pacing of a dog, for instance–may show that in this connection the animal’s sense of the future extends–like certain other animal...