Finding the light
On reading, writing & basking in the sun
I’m a ritualistic, superstitious reader: beginning a new book is a clean slate.
Typically I start reading a new book when there is sun. Morning sun is different than evening sun. If I begin a book in the morning, it becomes a “morning book”. An evening book too, is different than a night book. How the sun hits the page matters. The designations are important. The reading experience is influenced by a myriad of exterior forces. For me, the big one is light.
When is your magic hour?
Or rather—at what time of day do you enjoy reading most?
From A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain:
“I’ve never been able to understand people, like my husband, who don’t care about lighting, who are immune to harsh overhead lights. It’s especially awful in a bedroom, when you are trying to read at night. It isn’t conducive to winding down, and it flattens the imagination.”
In the morning, sunlight brightens the walls of my kitchen. This is my work space; there’s no room in the apartment for a proper desk. I savour the hours when the kitchen is lit up. A day is vast. Until noon. Then it’s over.1 There’s something encouraging, inspiring in the light. Ideas arrive. Work gets done. I like having flowers nearby—not always, but the space seems better with them: “A flowerless room,” said Vita Sackville-West, “is a soul-less room, to my thinking.”
Last week I bought a bouquet of white peonies. It was cooler than usual, almost like late September weather. The windows were open. Every time the breeze swept in, it carried the fragrance through the room. Soon, the solstice. And heat. By the time you read this, we’ll be in a heatwave. The sort of humidity that makes even moving from room to room unbearable. Perfect conditions, then, for reading. For cat-like basking.
At the kitchen table I keep a stack of books within arm’s reach, ones that I’m reading, ones that I’m meaning to get to, ones that I know I can dip and out of on a whim. Lately I’ve been revisiting books: Bear by Marian Engel, and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, for an essay I’m working on. I also recently found a copy of Margaret Atwood - Conversations, a collection published in 1990, which I’m loving. I received an early copy of Liars by Sarah Manguso, and although I’m only a few pages in, it’s reminding me of The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş, another wonderful book I recently read.
Like the idea of missing the lilac’s bloom, I get anxious when the sun begins to wane. I come to know its arrival and departure, down to the minute: I notice the days getting longer, the new shadows on my wall, how the sun now dips between two oak trees in the distance when it sets; in autumn its descent is more abrupt, falling out of my vision below the roof of the apartment across the way. I never want it to leave. There is something about a late afternoon in early summer. The sun travels around the building, filling my living room from five o’clock to just after eight—the perfect time to read or write. I migrate from kitchen to living room and try to squeeze as much from this time as possible, switching between three books, working on writing. I bask in the sun’s glow, greedy for what it gives me. Afternoon and evening sun lends something other than what is received in the morning, in the kitchen. Different work can be done. Different ideas arrive.
In her poem Meditation in Sunlight, May Sarton writes Sun opens every door.
When it fades, something fades with it.
A little bit of magic, maybe. Some unknown thing.
Lisel Mueller observed “How swiftly the stained honey / of afternoon light / flows into darkness.”
Every evening, an hour before / the sun goes down, I walk toward / its light, wanting to be altered, Linda Gregg offers in “The Light Continues”:
When the sun
is gone, the light continues
high up in the sky for a while.
When I return, the moon is there.
Like a changing of the guard.
I don’t expect the light
to save me, but I do believe
in the ritual. I believe
I am being born a second time
in this very plain way.
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