The moonlight at this moment—on the cusp of yesterday’s tomorrow—is bright enough to read by, a steely incandescence that seems to be made luminous from within the things on which it falls. There is an emergence of light, cascading outward, suffusing all that is and reaching for that perfect orb high in the sky. The sand for miles around lies in shiny, ashen ribbons, wending its way around and through colorless clumps of vegetation to pour onto vast plains from which emanates a non-igneous glow. No oranges, no reds, no greens or yellows, no blues even, not now, hours after sunset, nor whites: those hues left with the falling sun and now all the earth hereabout is bathed in silvery platinums and grays. Usually I am a person for colors—the closer to primaries, the better—but not tonight. Tonight belongs solely to the moon.
The world kills us all in the end. I keep saying this—have done for the last few years—at least in part because the world seems to keep saying it to me. I do not find the fact grievous, far from it. I am comforted by the turn of the seasons, by the livings and dyings all things do, by how we feed this planet and those who come after us when we ourselves leave. But there are elements of existence that stop me in my pragmatic tracks and make me wonder what it might all look like ages and ages hence, and moonlight this exquisite, this radiant, this steely? Reliably brings such a pause for wonder. And in the pause, life bores down to the bone.