On Reading Under Sunlight

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.