The other evening – specifically, a gentle June evening blissfully free of wind & high humidity – Tom & I sat out on our patio, gazing at the sky & enjoying what the French call l’heure bleue, “the blue hour.” If you’ve ever wondered, this is the same thing as “the gloaming.” Whatever the season, it is unquestionably my favorite time of day, although Midwestern winters render it much more enjoyable from the warmth of, say, a cozy restaurant with generous windows. Nevertheless, for the consummate l’heure bleue experience, all you really need is a cloud-free sky, an obstruction-free view of it & a comfortable place to settle for 45 minutes or so. (A glass of something lovely is not out of the question, either.)
Technically, the gloaming happens twice each day, but since I’ve never been a morning person, I prefer the one that occurs just after sunset. Even more technically, the whole thing is the result of the geometric center of the sun being a certain distance below the horizon & the fact that blue wavelengths are shorter than red…or something like that. Apparently, atmospheric particles & latitudes matter, too, but all I know is, summer or winter, we have fabulous gloamings around here.
Speaking strictly non-technically, during l’heure bleue, the sky offers up a panoply of blues: From a luminous, scrubbed, cool blue around the rim to a dense, velvety, warm blue at its dome, the range is seamless & stunning. Couple that with the blue hour’s reputation for being mysterious & magical, poised as it is between day & night but being neither one nor the other, & you can understand why it has been referred to in countless movies, songs & books, not to mention restaurant & bar names, throughout the years.
As far as I’m concerned, everything they say about the blue hour is true for it never fails to put me in a mood. Invariably as I watch it play out across the sky, I experience that poignant depth of feeling, that impulse to create, that tingly anticipation coupled with optimistic curiosity, that is my definition of inspiration. The result of this is a desire to copy Nature, no matter how inadequately, as a method, I suppose, of making it my own & no amount of telling myself it’s impossible to duplicate with pigment what can only be achieved by photons stops me from trying to memorize the sequence of celestial colors or from plotting out a palette in my head.
But then I remind myself that it’s not always necessary to act on every instance of inspiration. Sometimes it’s enough to just feel inspired…. & to know that every 24 hours, Earth will rotate on its axis until the geometric center of the sun is below the horizon. And when it does, inspiration will again be only a lawn chair & a glass of chardonnay away.