Dusk: The Magic Of Time

Dusk in New York City, Brooklyn
(Click picture to enlarge)

"Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel, I remember wondering, to be always together yet forever apart?" ~ Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

Sometimes it is hard to decide between two pictures. They may depict the same overall theme, but in such different ways... both beautiful, both bringing back memories, both capturing that most fleeting of moments... and yet be so very different...different places, different moods, different thoughts. Such was the case when I tried to pick out a picture for Carmi's weekly theme.

You could not find two more opposite photographs. Dusk in Brooklyn, in the hot, hazy summer... the buildings beginning to lose their detail and color, becoming simply a long row of dark cutout shapes along the horizon. It isn't yet dark enough for the lights in those skyscrapers to shine forth and show us that truly, the city never sleeps. It is that bewitching hour... when the shadows deepen and the air becomes still and heavy... summer in the city.

Dusk on the James River, Virginia

Then there is dusk on the river or, as I would say, in the country, for the James River road leading from Williamsburg to Jamestown is bordered on the east by the river and on the west by expanses of marsh, forest and only the rare small farm. It has always surprised me that the eastern sky at dusk is just as beautiful with fingers of pink and red and purple, as is the western sky of the setting sun. Here the twilight hour brings out the sounds of nature, rather than the sounds of taxis... often a gentle breeze, sometimes the sight of a large ten point buck bounding across the road into the woods and always the symphonic frog chorus.

Amazingly, in both settings it is not difficult to feel that moment of peace, solitude and quiet contemplation that we all need to regroup and calm that built up daily inner turmoil. Perhaps it is not the place that is that brings us back in focus...perhaps it is simply the magic of time... dusk.

Carmi's weekly photographic theme is "dusk".

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