Comments on a Sunrise

I watched the sunrise slowly expose the contours and colors of Catalina. At first it was only possible to see the profile of the island, not entirely unlike the profile of a body lying in state with its hands folded over its groin. The light went on to reveal textures and depth by grades and by degrees. From the vantage point of the Newport shore, on an exceptionally clear day--a day like today, a day after a rain--it is to distinguish brown slopes and patches of green scrub and the pixels of individual houses on the hillsides from twenty-two miles away.

I've been to Catalina a couple of times--seen its compromised wilderness and its blue waters and the town of Avalon, which is kitschy as fuck--I know it's a real place, beautiful in some ways and trashy in others, like most places I've been, though perhaps somewhat more beautiful than most. But seeing it like I saw it this morning, a person could believe that it is not some mundane place at all, but a locus for wonder and possibility, a frontier, an undiscovered world.

Such illusions necessarily fade, but they are glorious while they last. Such moments as these, though they come perhaps only a few times a year and last only scant minutes at most, can, in their remembrance, make tolerable the more vast by far slog of mundane time marked by disinterest and unmet thresholds and repetition.