The remains of a sunset.The remains of a sunset.

I was going through my holiday snaps today. More than two decades of here’s looking at me eat, drink and make merry with my savings. Walking down memory lane is a reminder that I have grown old. My skin is a little rougher around the edges, and smoother in places subjected to the daily grind of the razor, worn down like the right toes of that ancient bronze statue in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. My hairline has receded a bit, I squint through thicker glasses, and wear more expensive clothes. I’ve been fat and I’ve been thin. I’ve had a side parting on both sides and once, with disastrous effects, down the middle. I’ve been mostly happy – and when I wasn’t, I still smiled, because I was on holiday.

I can tell where I’ve been. There’s me and a sunburn posing in Africa and me nursing a cold in Parisian snow. A carb fest in Rome, thick bouillabaisse in Marseille, crispy skin (I’m too afraid to ask which animal it belonged to) in Macau. Then there’s a flurry of hands in India and nine million bicycles in rush hour Shanghai.

But in most photos, I can’t find myself on the map. Because it’s just a smile, a giant sunset and me. I could be anywhere. And it doesn’t really matter.

The plot is always the same. I’m coining a verb (eating, drinking, walking) when I notice an especially gorgeous sunset. Oranges and lemons in the sky. I take out my camera. Another person has the same idea. Then two lovers on a bench stop their whispering and take out their phone for a selfie against the red sky. A cyclist brakes and snaps. A lonely impulse is suddenly turned into a social effort – tens of people throwing feeble flashes against the light from a star which in one second produces more energy than we have ever produced in history.

But what lures us to the sun? Maybe because there is just one. Or we’re like insects, drawn to the light that can kill us or give us health.

And what makes sunsets so beautiful? Science explains how the colours of the sunset result from a phenomenon called scattering, where the light coming from the sky is scattered by molecules in the air. The different colours are determined by the wavelength of the light and the size of the particle.

Let’s turn to art for a more romantic, human explanation. Every painter and author has tried to capture sunset. Van Gogh’s Willows at Sunset is a fiery whirl and Monet’s Sunset in Venice has the same effect on the retina as when you look at the sun for too long – you close your eyes but the orange blob is still there, tickling your vision from the inside.

And from all the authors that have tried to peg down a sunset with words, I think John Steinbeck flew closest to the sun without burning his wings. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Californian author writes how: “A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”

Your sunset photos may not have the same artistic value. But they are nonetheless precious because they reflect your layers of meaning.

I remember a sunset in Bangkok. The sun went down like a meditation, scattering slow light over the golden temples. And a fiery one in India: yellows, reds and oranges dropping down like Candy Crush. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean it completed my desert island dream.

In Hong Kong, sunset was the biggest firework I had ever seen, towering above the lights in Victoria Harbour. In Africa, warbling pinks, elegant reds and fat purples stabbed my eyes with colour – like a dream democracy, it turned the rich and poor, black and white into the same essence of humanity. In Rome, the ruins turned into the glowing embers of Nero’s madness. And in Istanbul, the Bosphorus at sunset turned peach and mango – a smoothie.

At sunset, I almost expect a sizzling sound as the sun dunks down the water like a giant, sugar-coated, pink-frosted doughnut. But it doesn’t. Instead, there is a feather-downed silence, almost as if the world is catching its breath.

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