In Before Midnight, the third part of the Before-trilogy, Jesse and Celine are sat on a terrace in Greece watching the sun go down. Celine feels the need to accompany the moment with live commentary. Still there… still there… still there… gone, she says, staring at the horizon.
The sunset is one of the most universally loved phenomena. Everybody likes a good sunset. Still, I often find it hard to enjoy it. The fleetingness of the moment, and the very knowledge that I am supposed to find this beautiful, make me very aware of the moment. Its ephemeral quality might be the most important one, a sunset is a symphony that is always changing, never to be captured. But ultimately it is just what we make of it, what weight we attach to it: all it really is is a changing of the light, panoplied before us.
Author Don DeLillo is obsessed with sunsets. In the nature/nurture dichotomy, he seems to come down on the side of nurture when it comes to sunsets. He seems to continually grapple with it, and takes it as a symbol of our conscious search for happiness. It is a much more modern invention than we might think that everyone on this planet is entitled to a little happiness. And it might just be that real happiness can only be found in the unconscious, that the moment you start wondering whether you are happy, you have lost it already.
They discussed the sunset awhile, sitting on the desk with junk food and drinks. It was better than the previous day's sunset but lacked the faint mauve tones, according to Ethan, of the day before yesterday. They went inside and ate dinner, slowly, an uncoordinated effort. Jack complained that they were talking about the food while eating it, that they talked about sunsets while lookiing at them, so on, so forth.
This is from the novel Players, written in 1977. That urge to quantify things, to put them into perspective by comparison, seems to always loom over us. Some people keep proclaiming every new thing they do or experience as the best. "This is the best food I ever ate," or "I've never heard something so beautiful," or so on. At least there is excitement there. Some are more honest with themselves, and go in a detailed analysis, breaking it all down in parts until it falls apart. There is an old philosophical paradox called the Ship of Theseus. The paradox is whether an object that has all its component parts replaced is still essentially the same object. Perhaps that, if anything, is how to quantify beauty. The beauty is in the invisible marrow of life, in a sum being more than its parts, a current of undefinables running along the infinite lines of the unmappable. If you replace every component with a copy of itself and the end result is not still essentially the same, then there might have been beauty in it to begin with. Alas, you'll never get that beauty back.
Eight years later, sunsets played an important part in another Don DeLillo novel, White Noise. Here again, he ascerts how it is impossible to say why a sunset is so breathtaking.
Early that evening I drove Babette to her class in posture. We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it.
"We're not at the edge of the ocean or desert. We ought to have timid winter sunsets. But look at the blazing sky. It's so beautiful and dramatic. Sunsets used to last five minutes. Now they last an hour."
"Why is that?"
"Why is that?" she said.
White Noise is about the mediation of the world and trying to discern the real world from the world on television; trying and failing, for the world on television informs and affects the real world, now more than ever. People come to the small town where Babette and Jack live. They park their cars on the place with the best vista. It becomes something of an event, a you-had-to-be-there moment. Do people come because the sunsets are beautiful or because they are said to be beautiful?
DeLillo seems to finally make up his mind about it in his 2010 novel Point Omega.
He was here, he said, to stop talking. There was no one to talk to but me. He did this sparingly at first and never at sunset. These were not glorious retirement sunsets of stocks and bonds. To Elster sunset was human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder. We looked and wondered. There was a trembling in the air as the unnamed colors and landforms took on definition, a clarity of outline and extent. Maybe it was the age difference between us that made me think he felt something else at last light, a persistent disquiet, uninvented. This would explain the silence.
The old man here might as well be DeLillo himself, in his retirement still overanalyzing everything, but perhaps finally finding something else, something uninvented. This ties in perfectly with the scene from Players: perhaps all it takes it just to stop talking.
