Everything is Illuminated

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For a true reflection of a place, you’ve got to see the light.

By Trevor Boddy

PHOTO: OLA KOLEHMAINEN

Some travel for the sun. I travel for the light. It’s not that I lack interest in the glow of a Nordic sunset or the blaze of the tropics at midday, only that I find myself turning around and looking in the other direction. I grew up under the hyper-revealing, cold laser light of high plains Alberta, where a willow branch on the other side of a canyon is etched as precisely as a lithograph. Hiking solo near Egypt Lake in the Rockies, I had the rare, mystical honour of viewing the baffling atmospheric effect that meteo­rologists call a glory. This is a back-scattering of light where a silhouette of your own moving head appears, halo-like, projected onto nearby banks of fog. My first visits to Vancouver Island and the Northern California coast introduced me to the subtler pleasures of mist – the flattening of space that happens when air is more humid, with outlines first melding, then melting away.

More than trees, terrain or turrets, qualities of light transform mere geography into particular experiences. Our sense of a place is as much about how it’s seen as by what we are seeing. As an architecture critic, I fly all over the world to see the globe’s greatest structures, but these recollections of illumination are more strongly imprinted on my personal gazetteer.

What I thought was two solid weeks of jet lag on my first Australian tour was more likely some form of light lag. Antipodean illumination is as different from Alberta’s as gum trees are from aspens: the warm hues of high north sunlight at noon, turning blood-red late in the day. In India, what sticks in my mind’s eye is the there-and-nowhere-else dry season light of the subcontinent, dust-specked and resplendent with a thousand gods of colour. And for connois­seurs of travelling light, there is no banquet like Nunavut: the Arctic melodrama of fog and snow scrims around Pond Inlet; Iqaluit awaking to dawn bounced off Frobisher Bay’s flow ice; moss clumps lit up to the scale of redwoods in the flat eternity outside Cambridge Bay.

A much earlier light tourist – Impressionist Claude Monet – looked up at the Thames from his room in the Savoy and first saw, then painted the density of light hanging in air. What we reduce to a painterly style is now widely believed to be the reaction of Monet and his colleagues to the haze of a newly coal-fired Europe. Written in more modest quarters across the river in Lambeth decades before Monet’s visit, William Blake’s poem “The Mental Traveller” proposes that “the eye altering, alters all.” Enlightening.

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