In all those senses, the sun is godlike. As T. S. Eliot put it, light is the visible reminder of the Invisible Light. Like a god, the sun has fearsome and wondrous power. And like a god, the sun is difficult or even dangerous to look at directly. In the Book of Exodus, God says, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” No wonder that Christian writers have for centuries been punning on Jesus as being both Son and Sun. The Gospel according to John refers to Jesus as “the Light” so many times that it gets annoying. And there are gods of sunlight everywhere there are gods, from the Egyptian Ra to the Greek Helios to the Aztec Nanahuatzin, who sacrificed himself by leaping into a bonfire so that he could become the shining sun. It all makes a kind of sense: I don’t just need the light of that star to survive; I am in many ways a product of its light, which is basically how I feel about God.

People ask me all the time if I believe in God. I tell them that I’m Episcopalian, or that I go to church, but they don’t care about that. They only want to know if I believe in God, and I can’t answer them, because I don’t know how to deal with the question’s in. Do I believe in God? I believe around God. But I can only believe in what I am in—sunlight and shadow, oxygen and carbon dioxide, solar systems and galaxies.

But now we’re already swimming in sentimental waters; I’ve metaphorized the sunset. First, it was photoshopped. Now, it’s divine. And neither of these ways of looking at a sunset will suffice.

e. e. cummings has a sunset poem that goes,

who are you,little i

(five or six years old)

peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day

has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

It’s a good poem, but it only works because cummings situates the observation in childhood, when one is presumably too innocent to have yet realized how lame it is to write about sunsets. And yet, a good sunset is beautiful, and better still, universally so. Our distant ancestors didn’t eat like us or travel like us. Their relationship to ideas as fundamental as time was different from ours. They measured time not primarily in hours or seconds but mostly in relationship to solar cycles—how close it was to sunset, or to daybreak, or to midwinter. But every human who has lived for more than a few years on this planet has seen a beautiful sunset and paused to spend one of the last moments of the day grateful for, and overwhelmed by, the light.

So how might we celebrate a sunset without being mawkish or saccharine? Maybe state it in cold facts. Here’s what happens: Before a beam of sunlight gets to your eyes, it has many, many interactions with molecules that cause the so-called scattering of light. Different wavelengths are sent off in different directions when interacting with, say, oxygen or nitrogen in the atmosphere. But at sunset, the light travels through the atmosphere longer before it reaches us, so that much of the blue and purple has been scattered away, leaving the sky to our eyes rich in reds and pinks and oranges. As the artist Tacita Dean put it, “Color is a fiction of light.”