The line between night and day

The Station goes around the world in an hour and a half, which means it flies through fifty minutes of day, followed by fifty minutes of night, endlessly repeating. This means that during a seven-hour spacewalk, you may see four sunrises and sunsets. I remember holding onto a handrail on the outside of the Station, which was flying silently up the Atlantic, from south to north, and as we moved toward Europe I could see the terminator—the line between night and day—rolling up over the horizon ahead of us. The white sun sank quickly behind us in a showy flurry of orange, pink, and red horizon bands, and then we were suddenly in twilight, floating into the dark half of the world. The terminator flicked over us, and, in the deeper darkness ahead and below us, I could see a huge lit-up city, glued to the curved Earth, sliding up over the rim of the world to meet me. I could see the structure of the city, with its glowing heart, its network of roads and its halo of suburban lights fading into the dark countryside. The city was Cairo, looking beautiful and radiant. Down there, millions of people were trying to make a living, find or keep a job, provide for themselves and their families, and worrying about the future. I could cover all of them with one outstretched hand. Cairo slid under and then behind me, and more cities rolled into view over the horizon, all tacked to the outside curve of the planet surface, and all seemingly moving toward us, rather than us toward them.

— Piers Sellers

Image via APOD

'Even the light was different...'

Today I tried something. I’ve been thinking about what it must have been like out here before the change began, what the forest was like when there were still birds, so I called up a simulation in my overlays and walked out among the trees to listen. The noise was incredible. Birds shrieking and singing, things moving in the undergrowth. Even the light was different, thicker somehow, full of smoke and colour.

  Clade by James Bradley

Whooping, Nam throws his arms up in the air and twirls around, his street clothes disappearing, replaced in her overlays by one of his virtual creations, gorgeous feathered wings sprouting from his back, ribbons of light trailing from his hands and feet.

 Image via here

Icebergs

Photograph fail to convey the grandeur of icebergs. They also fail to convey how mutable they are. An iceberg that looks like a mesa in the distance as you approach transforms into something architectural, with melt-carved towers and wind-sculpted outcroppings suggestive of angels — as European explorers noted — or birds. Explorers, in their journals, grasping for comparisons with which to familiarise the strange, likens icebergs to cathedrals as well as angels. But icebergs lack the symmetries and patterns of a church. They exhibit form, but organic form, form sculpted by the subtle force of the coincident, form very on the chaotic. Every change in angle is a revelation. The light drapes differently. The shapes shift. The colours turn from white to turquoise to blue. In some there were grottos or canyons or isthmuses terminating in a peak that seemed about to great off. From the big one, cataracts of meltwater rushed into the sea. It occurred to me, admiring those waterfalls, that the before my eyes past was dissolving into the present.

— from Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn (2011)

Unpredictable violence

The Eskimo distinguish at least two different kinds of fear, writes Barry Lopez: ilira, which is the fear that accompanies awe, and kappa, which is the fear in the face of unpredictable violence.

Images: Vladimir Pushkarev/Russian Centre of Arctic Exploration and Marya Zulinova/Yamal government press service via Ecowatch 1 and 2.

21st century sublime

In a post on Rationally Speaking last year, Steve Neumann asked what can be sublime in the 21st century?

He argued that nature could no longer supply it, and "our feeling for the sublime, if it is to happen at all, will have to come more and more from culture." His chosen example was the music of...Led Zeppelin, and specifically their live performances.

But can the likes of Pagey, Percy, Jonsey and Bonso be the only trigger?

Turn back for a moment to Burke's 1757 treatise.  As an admirably concise video reminds us,  a feeling of the sublime is something that affects us viscerally despite the danger.  The sublime moves us deeply because it is tied to the possibility of pain. [1] When we experience the sublime we exercise the nerves that could save our lives in a genuinely threatening situation.

We may need those nerves when facing manmade effects in nature such as rapid climate change. For that reason, I'd say this sequence from Chasing Ice can arouse feelings of the sublime, as well as being scary.




Note [1] (added 4 December) "The physiology of fear and attraction [can be] so similar that we sometimes cannot tell them apart," writes Sy Montgomery.