In a previous time in my life, I worked
for a horrifically slutty web startup-- an outfit that produced just
the worst sort of clickbait-heavy, content-farming nonsense, staffed
largely by bro-ish guys in white V-necks, several of whom asked me
for advice on how to grow more facial hair (how I wish that last part
was a joke). Yet it had one great advantage, a lovely, older office
space in a loft, the sort of open space where the pale, Northwest
sunlight would come cascading in, over decaying water towers and
rooftop gardens, onto old wooden floors, through the sort of big
windows that made the corners ideal reading spots. And at break times, when I
needed a refuge, I would go and sit with my book. Where, for a little
while, I didn't have to think about the fact that I was making
starvation wages to fill search engine optimized pages with
Google-friendly verbal sewage.
It wasn't just the book. It was, just
as much, watery light against each page, revealing the fibers of the paper, the fringes of the letters, the cracks in the
spine.
To read the same thing under the office
fluorescents would have merely confirmed my entrapment in the
cesspool.
Just as important, I realized, is also
the interplay between artificial and natural lighting. To read under
a bedside lamp, under the covers, is the height of coziness. Yet to
read under that very same lamp when the sun is shining seems
claustrophobic. At best, the lamplight is unnoticeable. At worst,
it's like a ghoul, an undead simulacrum of the bright sun.
While I have to conclude that the
divide between the “natural” and the “artificial” is a
construction like any other-- and perhaps, in fact, the division that
we assume is the most artificial thing there is-- the way we
experience these two categories remains a valid phenomenological
distinction. Think about lemons. The taste of a fresh lemon can be
like the experience of a summer day, but artificial lemon just
reminds me of cleaning fluid. Or, conversely, the heat of a furnace
on a frigid night seems like a warm refuge, but a hot day leaves you
yearning for a cold drink.
And so the rays of the sun form the
baseline of our experience of light. No matter how much time we spend
indoors, the variety of natural light that we experience on a daily
basis is almost certainly the most common form of light that we see.
Much as the artificial lemon flavoring can never match the complex
blend of oils, esters, flavonoids, citric acid, etc. in the real thing. And no
electric light can truly mimic the particular blend of wavelengths,
that seems cleanest and most pure in sunlight.
Nowadays, I live in the tropics. I
don't spend so much time in the sun, and like more or less everyone
else here I try to avoid the vicious noonday brightness. And I've got
a job I don't despise nearly as much. But at lunchtime, I still want
to read in a sunny air-conditioned room, and open my book to see the
way the light hits the texture of the page.
