Vagamundos - The Green Ray

Before seeing the Green Ray in the Galápagos Islands.

In the quotations section of vagamundos, there is a Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation that I like very much. It reads: “although we travel searching for beauty, if we don’t carry it within, we won’t find it”. I say this because 2 days ago, I witnessed in La Coruña an act of unique and ephemeral beauty, the Green Ray, and there was a couple beside me playing with the cellular phone who did not realize anything.

Before seeing the Green Ray in La Coruña

Although I have looked for it during many years and in many sunsets, I have seen it 3 times in my whole life, the time before last in a very special place, the Galápagos Islands, and with a very special companion too. According to the legend, one won’t know true love until one sees the Green Ray, but it is just that, a legend. What is true is that it exists (the green ray and, well, true love too), and when I talked about it at a night program in Radio 1, a curious phenomenon occurred. Several people called to say that they had seen it too and they told their experiences that had also been extraordinary.

Trees near the Hercules’ Tower.

It may seem trivial for our society that someone feels touched watching a sunset and describes the green ray that lasts one second as a great experience, but it has a lot to see with the quotation at the beginning of this diary. We have surrounded ourselves with many material things that make so much noise that we have lost our ability to marvel at basic, simple things, at truly magic things, as a flower when it opens, or a bird when it sings, or the sun when it sinks below the horizon leaving a fantastic visual gift for us. Taking a photo of the sun with one of those cellular phones equipped with a camera got this couple to miss the magic of that instant. I have photographed hundreds of sunsets, but many times I have been so stupefied by what I was watching that I left the camera in its case not to miss anything upon watching through the lens of the camera.

Sunset at the beach

Fortunately, not everyone and not all times have been like this. In fact, the Green Ray served as a basis for Julio Verne to write a novel with the same name. It was removed from the catalogues in Spain many years ago (it was not one of his best works). In said novel, with the excuse of searching for the Green Ray, he made fun of the corseted British society of the nineteenth century. The scientific reasons of the Green Ray phenomenon do not deprive its search of romanticism. Even a movie director as Eric Rohmer, one of my favorites, was freely inspired by Julio Verne’s novel to tell the story of the search for Pauline’s love in Le Rayon Vert, which won La Palma de Oro and the award of the critics in the 1986 Venice festival.

Sunset behind the Hercules’ Tower.

That afternoon, the Green Ray was just the climax, the summum, or however you wish to call it, of a spectacular twilight that I enjoyed at the base of the oldest active lighthouse in the world, the Hercules’ Tower in La Coruña, now proposed to be designated World Heritage, title that it deserves for its antiquity and for having led so many ships in its history, with its light or with the antifog siren that is heard in all La Coruña when the white mantle comes down over the city. People keep on asking me if my country has become boring after so many trips around the world, I say that what occurs is just the opposite, the older I grow, the more I appreciate what I have at home. The tear that ran down my face and the hair in my skin that stood on end when the green ray penetrated into my pupil was the same as in Antarctica when surrounded by an overwhelming nature.

John Livingston Seagull and the light of La Coruña Marine Walk.

I never get tired of saying that “essential things are not seen with the eyes”, a lesson of “The Little Prince”, and that “to see the world in a grain of sand and paradise in a wild flower, take the infinite in the palm of your hand and eternity in one hour” as William Blake used to say. And that is my advice, go to the beach or to the country, full of flowers in this spring, put a grain of sand or a flower in the palm of your hand, and I am sure that after an hour you may have not seen Paradise, but you will be a little happier. And if that beach or country is in Galicia, much better. I’m not going to lie saying that beaches are wonderful and that nothing happened here, but I assure that Galicia has much more to offer and you won’t feel disappointed.

See you soon!!

From La Coruña, España

Translated by Mariela
mcmmcm@mipunto.com
on August, 18th 2003

Publicado: 18/08/2003 19:53

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