Sol Goes Home

"Did you see it?"
"Yes."
"Isn't it beautiful?"
"Oh yes."
"I told you."
"How could I know? How could I ever imagine?"

We all experience nature as does the grieving Thorn, who is too young in Soylent Green's post-apocalyptic universe to know it from memory--"how could I ever imagine?"--but nonetheless knows that it is beautiful. It is beautiful precisely because it appears to him and us through the eyes of the dying father, the last image of power--the power of all of human history and knowledge-- reduced to a shrunken, whimpering child, smiling stupidly at the sight of a grazing faun. Thorn necessarily could not have imagined it until this very moment, looking through the window into a locked temple where nature is already staged as the failure of power, a return to the womb--to a time before knowledge and memory, and it can only appear as beautiful as it is falling away: the colors grow dim in the dying eyes of the father and then the screen goes black.

Do we leave nature or does nature leave us? Either way, it can only be encountered as it ceases to be, when we weep at the grandeur of the setting sun before the lights go on and the credits roll.