Light, Losing it

 

a     wan   sun

  appeared

in the   gray  sky

 

-- Janet Malcolm,

 

 

From gaol:

 

Outside,

the day may be blue and gold,

 

but the light that creeps down

through the thickly muffled glass

of the small iron-barred window

beneath which one sits,

 

is grey and niggard.

It is always  twilight  in one’s cell.

-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897)

 

 

The Reading Room of the British Museum:

 

Some of the fog had seeped into the great domed space, increasing the gloom, so that the desk lamps seemed like so many street lamps in a miniature city of crecents and circuses  as he prowled in search of Amber.

… gaslamps, each with a halo  of irradiated fog.

-- David Lodge, A Man of Parts (2011), p. 241-3

 

 

Atom-bomb test:

 

A hundred-times-sun-sized sun

mottled itself with lesser whiteness,

 

bulked up,

became the perfect sphere…

 

Tumors of light   more brilliant than the sun

sprang up on the mathematical sphere;

yet these,  less blazing than the fireball,

appeared as blacknesses.

-- Philip Wylie, “The Answer”