Starfire 152 wrote:The last 7 paragraphs of AATE describe what is seen normally at sunrise. The eastern sky brightens, the stars fade, terrestrial objects and features become "vaguely" visible.
Yes, exactly. I think the language here is all figurative. It's taking something mundane (dawn) and seeing it through the lense of the miraculous--both the miraculous that was always there, inherent in this glorious event, and the miraculous of what makes this particular dawn literally catastrophic: the coming of the Worm. Its approach has blotted out the sun, but the sun's glow is still there, and has blotted out the stars.
Many of us have watched sunsets, I'm sure. They are romantic, climactic, sweetly sad. They are an End, a spectacle, a transition into the mystical night when the earth drops away both in our sight and in our awareness as we go to sleep. But sunrises are something different, something that most of us don't stand around watching. It happens often while we're asleep, not looking, not noticing. We wake up with a day fully formed and take it for granted.
The return of the sun is the affirmation of hope, renewal, a new beginning. The transition from the spiritual/heavenly/dream world of the Night back into the brightness of the everyday mundane world of Day is both comforting and normalizing. The dimensions of reality ease back into smaller, more familiar, brighter, easier to grasp scope. But if you've ever watched it happen with the same attention you might give a sunset, you'll notice exactly what Donaldson describes here. The stars seem to get briefly brighter merely from the fact that you can still see them with dawn in the sky. If you've been watching them all along, you already know where the brightest ones are (unlike dusk when they often "sneak up" on you). Knowing their positions helps you to keep track of them as they fade one by one. It always surprises me how long I can see Jupiter or Venus against a blue sky, and this surprise can be characterized as a relative "brightening," the
endurance it shows against this stronger light.
This day-without-a-dawn image is a classic staple of fantasy, right back to The Return of the King when Sauron sends forth his smokes and fumes to cover the land with darkness. Since the return of day is the return of the normal and the mundane--the fulfillment of the vague promise that the future will always be like the past--anything which disrupts this cycle calls our attention back to the largest scale of our existence, that scope which is revealed at night when we can literally see to the ends of the universe. The disruption of Future's Promise, the intrusion of the "spiritual" upon the mundane, and the expansion of reality to its largest scale, all combine to show us how illusory our complacency and self-imposed limits really are. We really don't have any assurance that the future will be like the past, nor is there anything about this world that is truly normal and mundane. The limits we enjoy during the day, which shrink reality down to a managable scope, are just subjective ways to make sense of the Void.
