MOONLIGHT

Middle of the night again. In a daze I peered through the lazily drawn curtains and saw the gardens and the park covered in snow.

Wait, what?

Well not snow. Moonlight - but that full, silvery moonlight that so beautifully paints everything white in the small hours of a cold morning. I feel as though even I might look noble out there, lined in jewels and clothed in silver.

I’m not going out there. I’m staying in here where it’s warm and I can look at the moon and think of Nocturnes, and Sonatas, and Debussy, and Schubert, Chopin, and Beethoven: the masters of the night music. They knew how to capture the mood.

Monet used to paint snow scenes with blue - somehow it works, and with low light there’s an even more pronounced optical illusion that shifts all the colours to the blue end of the spectrum. Moonlight isn’t really silvery, and yet it is.

But then, if you think about it, light isn’t really any colour at all - that bit’s kind of interpreted by our brains, which tell us how the wavelength of the light ought to be processed. Before they met my eyes, the photons that started in the sun some nine minutes ago before bouncing off the moon... were completely invisible, by definition.

Well. I don’t want to think about that too much. Science gets in the way of art sometimes, and, as a friend of mine is keen to point out, you ‘can’t always rely on the data’. Sometimes you just have to enjoy the output, much like the old masters did.

So I perch on the windowsill, where at other times I’d watch lightning storms or snowfall. The park is bathed in the cool moonlight, grass gently blowing, trees fluttering and stars glittering. It is a beautiful night.