Outside, the world continues. The river, even overflowing its banks, still meanders. I glance from my laptop screen to the river, then back to the screen, and then to the river. For no reason I know, a memory coalesces: After the Academic Decathlon competition in Newark was over, we ended up with our Zimas on the roof of that hotel—Todd and me and a couple of our teammates. It was late at night and New York City glowed pink in the distance. We were the sixth best Academic Decathlon team in the nation, we were getting just the right amount of utility out of our Zimas, and we loved each other. Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back to the roof of that hotel. But the memory still holds me together.

I give the Academic Decathlon four and a half stars.

SUNSETS

WHAT ARE WE TO DO about the clichéd beauty of an ostentatious sunset? Should we cut it with menace, as Roberto Bolaño did so brilliantly, writing, “The sky at sunset looked like a carnivorous flower”? Should we lean in to the inherent sentimentality, as Kerouac does in On the Road when he writes, “Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields . . . the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries”? Or perhaps we should turn to mysticism, as Anna Akhmatova did when she wrote that in the face of a beautiful sunset,

I cannot tell if the day

is ending, or the world, or if

the secret of secrets is inside me again.

A good sunset always steals the words from me, renders all my thoughts as gauzy and soft as the light itself. I’ll admit, though, that when I see the sun sink below a distant horizon as the yellows and oranges and pinks flood the sky, I usually think, “This looks photoshopped.” When I see the natural world at its most spectacular, my general impression is that more than anything, it looks fake.

I’m reminded that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tourists would travel around with darkened, slightly convex mirrors called Claude glasses. If you turned yourself away from a magnificent landscape and looked instead at the landscape’s reflection in the Claude glass, it was said to appear more “picturesque.” Named after seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, the glass not only framed the scene but also simplified its tonal range, making reality look like a painting. Thomas Gray wrote that only through the Claude glass could he “see the sun set in all its glory.”

The thing about the sun, of course, is that you can’t look directly at it—not when you’re outside, and not when you’re trying to describe its beauty. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes, “We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk around carefully averting our faces this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.”