Il faut confronter des idées vagues avec des images claires.
Jean-Luc Godard, in La Chinoise
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We were staying at the Hyatt Centric hotel in Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, Malaysia, overlooking the South China Sea. The sunsets there are renowned. As I stepped out from our twentieth-story air-conditioned room onto the balcony to capture the scene, the camera lens and viewfinder fogged up. So did my glasses. I pressed the shutter anyway.
“Im Abendrot” (At Sunset) is the last of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, composed on a text by Joseph von Eichendorff in 1948, when Strauss was 84. The song ends with the line “Ist dies etwa der Tod?”—Can this perhaps be death? —to the exquisite trilling of two skylarks rising into the heavens in the violins. When I was young, I thought “Im Abendrot” was sublime. Nowadays the cynic in me says: sublime kitsch.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Camera lucida 
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