Friday, May 18, 2007

The Construction of Light

Generally I get to work around 6.40 and work in the staffroom until we go out for flag-raising at 7.25. This morning I broke the routine as I needed to pop across to the office at 6.55 to write an announcement that had slipped my mind when I arrived. As I walked across the open space where we do flag-raising the light had a quality I've sometimes (though not that frequently) noticed before, usually around that time of the morning. For five minutes or so there was a heavy kind of yellowness which seemed to glow on everything, making the world more vivid, more actual somehow. The floor particularly seemed to be lit from the inside. Nothing in the sky seemed to account for this phenomenon, though I suppose it must have been connected with the rising sun. My body told me to expect a storm. The heaviness of the light suggested something was on its way. But nothing arrived. By the time I came out of the office, mission accomplished, the world was disappointingly ordinary again.

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