By Nick Shears
If you happened to be looking up on Friday evening you might have noticed the spectacular, if not peculiar, sky, composed of a strange cloud pattern set against a gorgeous sunset. The effect was awesome and unsettling to me, and I don’t think I was alone.
From where I stood on the corner of West 64th Street and Broadway, underneath One Lincoln Plaza’s sprawling arcade, people stopped in their tracks, craned their necks and forced their gazes upwards, a rare sighting in and of itself when most of our attention is monopolized downward by our screen devices.
Couples pulled at each others’ sleeves, beckoning and beseeching their partners to look westward, as if a UFO was hovering over the Opera house.
The clouds seemed to smother us in their closeness and stillness. These were not shifting clouds. These were congealed and caked and scalloped, like we were staring up into a sky-sized tub of the most gorgeous ice cream. It certainly had a hallucinatory effect, but also something sinister. Beneath the beauty were gleams of angst and foreboding. The weight and proportion of the clouds combined with the fire-colored sunset gave it a biblical intensity, the effect of which both sharpened the senses yet relaxed the bones in the helplessness confronted with nature, or, as some would say, a “higher power”.
Punctuating the auspicious air was the skeletal steel spire of the renovated church rising up a block away from a bed of scaffolding and black netting. And beyond that, I saw the dull red glow of the latest newcomer – another bank – one of the few retailers that can afford three sides of frontage on this mighty yet unforgiving commercial block, but not without seeing the warm, comforting smoke of spiced meat wafting from the defiant halal cart parked right in front of it.
Perhaps it was the incoming nor’easter, or the outgoing UN bluster, or the continuous drumbeat of AI doomsayers, but the strange sunset seemed like an appropriate stamp and seal on a strange time, and somehow made it all, in all its confusion, make sense.
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