Thursday 23 September 2010

Sunlight

The boy from the logistics department walked into my room: “I am here to pick up some boxes. They said I had to be in the dark room.”

They call my office ‘the dark room’ because I refuse to switch on the lights. I sit in the corner of the room surrounded by windows and enjoy the natural light as long as there’s a bit of sunshine outside. I always thought this was because I liked the sunlight so much. But recently I realised: it’s because I hate bright artificial light.

I remember a room where we had our math lessons at school when I was about ten years old. The room was on the first floor. It was the first lesson on Tuesdays, starting at 8:30. In the winter, when it was still dark outside, the room was filled with the bright yellow light from the lamps on the ceiling. It was the coldest room in the whole building. Our mathematics teacher was not mentoring any class, so there were no parents to fill the slits in the windows with foam rubber and seal them with long stripes of paper. You could hear the freezing wind whispering through the windows. I liked math, but somehow I always felt lonely and abandoned during those lessons. I didn’t enjoy the school in general, but in the winter I simply hated it. For the cold rooms. And for the yellow lights.

The lights in my office are white, but somehow when they are switched on I feel a tiny bit abandoned like many years ago during my math lessons in the cold room on the first floor. I prefer to stay in ‘the dark room’.

Philip Glass - Metamorphosis 1

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