As a child I was exposed repeatedly to a reproduction of Fragonard’s 1767 painting, “The Swing.” My mother has since apologized for exposing me to what she refers to as “French erotica,” but she is not to be blamed for this painting's bizarre effect on me. While I am sure a psychoanalyst or one of the many mediocre therapists I’ve had in life will tell you that it formed my conception of self, I find instead it made me afraid of clouds.
Or perhaps, more accurately, it made me afraid of grey-green days, when the sun is present but hidden, and the forces beyond this world, like the angels in the painting, are looking on with embarrassment or horror or both, at the inanity of humanity. That’s a very charmed and wordy way of writing: I am afraid of Humanity (note the capital H) and its lustful pursuit of passions.
The other day the sun, obscured by clouds, painted the green tree outside my window a dull, dark grey with, nonetheless, a sense of luminescence. I quickly called my wife, “Caroline, come quick, you won’t believe what it looks like outside!”
From the other room, I heard her say, almost with a sigh, “It looks like that French painting, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said as she came in.
“It just looks cloudy.”
“It freaks me out,” I said.
“They’re just clouds,” she said.
Despite my preferences, I did not feel sorrow so much as an overwhelming loneliness, located in the lulling solitude of a Spring Saturday afternoon.
The image that came to mind was that of a dog in a dreamscape, a black speck alone against the infinite empty. The fragility of it all pained me, and I wondered what de Goya might have felt when he painted that lonely dog in the desolate wasteland.
Was he, like me, afraid of the boundlessness?
When people see Edvard Munch’s “Sun,” the inevitable faux-optimism of Nietzchean philosophy is invoked. Man will climb the mountain, and man will see the light of day. The Munch website even says it represents, “the sun image in pure, intense, and masculine dominance.”
I see little of the Nietzschean and even less of the masculine. Here is an image of joy, simply portrayed as one of nature’s more bountiful miracles: the sun rising or setting. There’s not much to say about it, as there’s not much to say about an actual sunrise or sunset. It simply is, and it’s simply beautiful.
