Sir Thomas Gainsborough - Mrs. Thomas Hibbert
Emily Dickinson writes about a “certain slant of light,/Winter afternoons,” which I’ve been thinking of a lot as I wake up these days. There’s definitely a certain slant of light on summer mornings. I feel (kind of) sorry for those who sleep in air conditioning and don’t get to fully experience it.
It’s only a trick of my ear that thinks of Dickinson, for this slant of light is not oppressive like the light in her poem. It’s a low angled, almost curved, light, which accompanies a time of softness, space, invitation. Movement is easy enough, though after the restlessness of a night of trying to find a cool place on the sheets, you may not want to move much. Your body feels suddenly dry, almost powdered. The air, because you are careful not to fully open blinds, is tinged by a slight blue-grey wispiness like the hair in a Gainsborough painting.
Sounds are distinct, but muted—footsteps below your window, water running upstairs—there is nothing like a Sunday morning after a sultry night in New York City for quiet. Stereos stilled–if there is a music, it’s in the tradition of John Cage.
You can smell that it will be hot again soon; you can even see it after a while –just there, at the corner of your eye. The promise seems not to come from the sky so much as from the sidewalk, which, with its cached memory of yesterday’s heat, early radiates an incipient over-brightness.
But, the heat’s not forced itself into your apartment yet; for these minutes, Gainsborough lingers in the air, and the breeze whispers at just the right pitch.
(If you like summer and sultry, but are more into elephants than Gainsborough, check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson, on Amazon.)
(And, for a complete change of pace, check out yesterday’s post, why people hate banks.)
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