Sunrise vs. Sunset

Poets love sunset, chanting: "O, the splendor of sunset, only to be marred by the approach of night." So do painters, although usually for a different reason—they're only triggered by the visual impact itself, not by a deep feeling for departing beauty. Sometimes I will set off at one in the afternoon, with the painter's box on my back, towards the highland or the seashore, waiting to capture the splendor of sunset. As the fiery ball sinks to its daily doom, the shadows of my own figure and the easel I had brought were increasingly lengthened on the sandy ground. The sky, once so blue, turns a purplish blue and then a purplish red. It soon changes into a vast expanse of multihued clouds. Escorted by them, the sun disappears below the horizon. Darkness finally falls, engulfing everything within its sphere. This fleeting splendor is just as hard to catch in a painting as daybreak. Sunset glows captured by a photographer are, too, hardly distinguishable from the first glimmer of day. Even Monet's renowned piece, "Impressions, Sunrise (Impression, Soleil Levant)," can easily be mistaken for a sunset scene. A bright sunrise, after all, isn't that different from a bright sunset. The sun emits the same heat and splendor whether it's sunrise or sundown. Only due to the different ways heat spreads on the earth's surface in the early mornings and late afternoons, different hues are seen around the horizon at different times of day. The background for first streaks of daylight tends to be lukewarm or chilly, whereas the setting sun is usually immersed in an aura of profuse warmth. A painter can be sensitive enough to such slight variations in tone, but sometimes he finds it hard to adjust them to his satisfaction. The subtle difference between sunrise and sundown is hard to define anyway.

However, the distinction between sunrise and sundown in a man's life is clear-cut. Nobody will confuse senility with the flowering of youth. People can love both sunrise and sundown. But whereas they love youth, do they also love old age? There is only a gap of twelve hours between sunrise and sundown, yet the one will never have the chance to greet the other. Well-intentioned people like to imagine a meeting of the two. How wonderful if this fantasy could become a reality! It would be a hug between youth and age, the beginning of a human life linking hands with its end, the continuation of a father's existence through is son's flesh and blood. The sun, traveling alone across the heavenly dome, is bound to be split up, with one half of it going to dawn, and the other half, dusk. Doesn't this coincide with the futility of life's sunrise and sundown trying to look each other in the face?