Sunset juice, pasteurized

Ultimate beauty is heartbreaking and unfulfilled. It can’t be reproduced in its totality: a sunset on a picture is lacking the smells, the sounds, the sensations. The smell of muddy water, the chirping of the grasshoppers, the croaking of the frogs, the cracking flames in the nearby fire someone’s put up... The sensation of a warm evening breeze on your face, the touch of a little boy’s warm hand in your hand. The cries of someone on the other shore, the babbling of the water on the pebbles, the swishing of the paddles… The subtle play of the colours on the sky, and their reflection in the water.  All this together makes up a picture of perfection that only lasted a few minutes.

But the beauty of the moment resides in its evanescence: not the sights, the sounds, the smells, the sensations. The knowledge that it will be gone in a moment, the sadness that I’ll be gone in a couple of hours, and will only get another such opportunity in a few months from then – all this was essential.

But back then I ignored it and tried to freeze the moment. I felt the sudden urge to capture the ultimate beauty, and started to take pictures, one after another. None of them was good enough. I put the phone back into my pocket, only to take it out once again, to capture yet another perfect element, yet another perfect perspective, put it all together and make it complete, preserve it for the uglier evenings  awaiting me. Put the beauty in the jar and pasteurize it, as my sister does with raspberries, turning them into raspberry juice.

Raspberries are very fragile. They taste excellent when fresh, but give them one day in their packaging and they will rot away. To prevent that, she mixes them with sugar, allows them a few days to give up and bleed, then sucks up their juice. She then pasteurizes the bottled product so that the taste survives through the winter months without rotting away.

I tried to do the same with my sunset. I took this picture, and that one, and yet another one, and then one more, seen from a different perspective, one more shot once the sun had dropped further, and one more from up the hill, and oh, that boat on the horizon, that adds up, too. So, now I should have it all – I thought, and put the phone back in my pocket for good. This is what my sunset juice tastes like, pasteurized:

But it wasn’t at all like that. Don't believe the picture-postcard sweetness. There were mosquitoes buzzing, the water smelled of mud and I was about to leave. The real experience was like the taste of a fresh raspberry picked up directly from the stem, and not like that of pasteurized juice.