09.11.05
A world of greyscale
I went for a walk with my mother today. We walked through the park down by the coast just before 8 PM as the sun was going down and twilight was spreading. It felt like walking through the transition from day to night, watching as all the colour is slowly drained out of the world. We walked through several small gardens full of roses and other colourful flowers, but in the semi-darkness they were all various shades of grey. When the world was devoid of colour, the last of the light began to wane until we were walking through darkness. There were no lamps in the park, but by that time we had reached the coast and we could see the lights from the city on the other side of the water.
Civilization looks best from afar and in complete darkness, where the roaring and polluting cars are nothing but a long row of coloured lights moving across a nigh-invisible bridge and buildings can only be made out as collosal silhouettes against clouds dimly lit from below. As we passed the shacks along the river where some people live all year despite only being allowed to stay over the summer, the area seemed to have a distinctive cyperpunk quality to it: On one side, the ramshackle wooden houses supported by rotting pillars sticking out of the water, garbage littering the ground between the small buildings and nothing but the loud hum of a gas generator to break the silence. On the other side, the brilliantly glowing windows of a high-tech skyscraper in self-proclaimed “Biocon Valley” beyond the light and noise of a freeway leading straight into the center of Copenhagen. And in the middle, two lonely figures navigating a gravel path through the desolate shrubberies of no-man’s land. I could hardly make it sound any more dystopian without actually lying, but that was really how it felt to be there.
My favourite time of day has got to be the mythical twilight zone between day and night, where all colours fade to a mystical grey mass and the world seems to become two-dimensional for a while. During those hours, you must strain to see the world around you, and it’s very easy to just let go and surrender to your imagination. I feel that what you can’t see is often far more interesting than what you can.
Oh, and I’ve also updated my bio.
