COROT - THE PLEASURES OF THE EVENING

         If it were just a beautiful landscape, I wouldn't be drawn to it so strongly. Thank god it is not. The beauty of this painting is like a golden dress whose wearer is none other than our old friend fear, out for a deceptive evening stroll. His garments lend him the grace and sadness of age and wisdom, and because they hide what we all hide in our hearts, fear gives beauty a tenuous reality that makes her all the more heartbreaking.

         The painting is of evening, the vanishing and dying of daylight, which in old age signals death. The woods are dark, already filled with impenetrable night, a time when even the innocent are slain and dragged off by the dark angle.

At the edge of these shadows, a group of women dance, alone, without families or men. This is always unsettling for civilization. And then we learn that they are not even human. It's not our happiness they celebrate. They belong to the other world, the immortal world, which we may not enter until after death. The light is too dim to see if one is missing a tooth, or has a crooked knee, or is related to witches (who else would dance alone with nature), or sirens, or figments of our tired imaginations that we finally cannot control. The trees bend their bodies in time to the music of the wind, their shadowy darkness threatening from above.

Last and most beautiful is the light. It is the color of gold tinged with blood, where it touches the earth. It is wealth, immortality, all the things man desires and cannot have. That the light is so exquisitely expressive and is doomed to fade, able to teasingly return but never remain is the heart of fear in all of us as we near death who reaches out like the trees. We have no control of the night, only a graceful acceptance on the edge of night.