xtcian

7/7/02 Looking at the sun

7/7/02

Looking at the sun is so forbidden that actually doing so is like stumbling upon a superhero while they sleep. It's rare that something in nature takes on such perfect form, and ever since I was a little kid, I've been mesmerized by the flawless circle of the Sun. The Earth looks oblong and messy, even from space, and there something about the Moon's craters, as well as its waxing and waning, that offsets the sphere. But if you get to observe the Sun on those lucky days when it won't microwave the back of your occipital lobe, you will see, from nature, the perfect circle.

Of course, you have to wait until days like today to do it. Due to some freak fire up in Canada, visibility up here in New England has been substantially reduced by smoke, making every landscape look like those Polaroids from the 70s that have been exposed to air too long. While pictures don't do it justice, I snapped a quick one of Tessa gardening our urn (boy, that sounds like a euphemism, eh?) with the sun hanging in the background:

It reminded me of a day in 10th grade calculus class, when our teacher Mrs. Baird was explaining something on the chalkboard. In the middle of a mess of graphs and formulae, she accidentally drew the most perfect manmade circle any of us had ever seen. It remained on the board for a few minutes during her lecture until someone in class raised their hand and said, "Um, I think you just drew a perfect circle." She stopped, and the whole class continued to stare at it. Everyone looked for a flaw, even a slight one, but we couldn't find any. She left it on the board for weeks until a custodian, not knowing, washed it away.