Sunset, Sunday, 9 August 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Following Thoreau, in Walden, I might compare the Blue Ridge to a sort of universal music.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

That’s the sweet sort of sound I’d noticed, as a child, when we stayed up on the side of Fox Mountain – a filtered music rising from the valley floor and off the opposite massive wall of Pasture Fence Mountain. Now, each night, all sounds between here and the mountains, from Fox Mountain and Pigeon Top to the hum of U.S. 29 a mile away to the birds in the nearby woods, merge into one twilight tone.

L’heure bleue, the Blue Ridge, a blue note.