Monday, May 01, 2006

Clear View

The mountains are clear right now. It occurred to me yesterday that, in some ways they resemble crinkled aluminum foil, painted over with Wite-Out. This is not a very poetical image, even though the mountains are beautiful.

When I first moved here, I was struck by how the whole vista to the south looked like an elaborately photographed Hollywood backdrop, with only the nearby trees in front of the backdrop actually seeming to be real. As I have come to know the place better, this image has faded slightly, but is still striking. The view out the window has two distinct distances - the close up and the very far away. The middle distance is shielded from view by the close.

Is there a metaphor for life here? The things in the distance are the past - mostly static and a bit unreal. What we see most closely is the present, which obscures the middle distance.

Best not take that too far.

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