17 April, 2012
South Campus
Around 5:00 pm
I’ve just gotten off work and am walking from the eastern side of south campus towards Emily Lowe. It’s one of the insanely hot days we had earlier this week, the sun shining bright and hard. Squinting up at the sky, I notice something I had never actively noticed before: the clouds between me and the sun have shadows.
For whatever reason, this really surprised me. I’ve been on many planes before and have noticed when we’re still flying low that patches of the green down below is covered with a cloud’s shadow, but it is so immense that you don’t notice you are in fact in a shadow when you’re on the ground. But when I looked up at the sky and saw the outer edges of the fluffy white clouds strikingly brighter than the center of the cloud facing away from the sun, I realized that I had never actively made notice of the fact that clouds have shadows. It makes perfect sense – objects cast shadows, mass casts shadows. But for whatever reason I never connected that to clouds. Which means that every single drawing I did as a kid with the yellow sun taking up one corner and a tree the other with some white clouds in the middle have been inaccurate – there should have been some grey in those clouds, even in the perfect spring or summer scenes I drew. This realization was surprisingly thought provoking for me. I should probably pay more attention to my surroundings so I don’t miss these obvious things.
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