Comment De Deux

On our post Full Moon, Anonymous commented yesterday...

Another stereo view: This morning as the day began to lighten I stood at the window to see a bright moon high up in the western sky, taking its final curtain call after the night's performance. Hours later on my walk, an opalescent sun, also now in the west, emitted pale light through vaporous clouds.

Reminds me of a poem from my schooldays:

Around around the sun we go
the moon goes round the earth
we do not die of death
we die of vertigo.

-- Archibald MacLeish


Then Anonymous continued...

Regarding the lunar curtain-call allusion, my conscience is pricking me. I leaned too heavily on Proust - or more precisely, on a Proust passage as found in How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton.

According to de Botton, in the first volume of his novel Proust "skirted two thousand years of ready-made moon talk and uncovered an unusual metaphor better to capture the reality of the lunar experience." Proust wrote:

Sometimes in the afternoon sky, a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to "come on" for a while, and so goes "in front" in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.

I see now that I missed an opportunity to try to describe the wintry sun in a more original fashion - say, as a ballerina costumed in white feathers, dancing Swan Lake. Dang!