Light is beautiful.
Before I became an artist, I didn’t really pay attention to light. Light illuminates our lives, but it also casts a shadow on everything we perceive.
When light hits your skin, there’s a chance it will bounce around inside your skin before being scattered outwards, changed by the experience. This is called subsurface scattering, and without it, our skin would look plasticky and utterly inhuman. If you ever stop to notice subsurface scattering in action when someone’s skin or hair catches the light, it’s beautiful. I realize that sounds a little weird, but it’s true. A person’s face contains hundreds of thousands of unique colours, something that just can’t be captured by most currently available digital media.
It’s 8:05 PM on December 6th as I’m writing this. Looking out my window, I see hundreds of Christmas lights shining out into the darkness.
These lights are a metaphor for our lives. The nature of life is to reverse entropy locally, for the price of higher entropy elsewhere. We are shining out into the void, knowing that one day all the lights will go out, and the universe will be cold and empty. Forever. The universe as we know it is a footnote in a cold, dead, and empty void.
Sometimes this makes me sad, but in a way, it’s beautiful. Nothing matters, but that goes for the good stuff as well as the bad. Everything that’s holding you back and causing you pain will be gone in a blink of an eye, with you along with it. This isn’t a reason to give up and forget everything that drives you; if nothing matters, you can be a good person just because. You don’t have to justify yourself to anyone. I love the philosophy of absurdism because it gives us the best answer to our predicament: laugh. Who cares if nothing matters? It feels like it matters to me. We can bury our heads in the sand and ignore the reality of our situation. We can give up. Or, we can show the universe just how much meaning we can find in our meaningless life. The universe won’t care, but why should you care what the universe thinks?
To me, this is what Afterglow is about. The universe is beautiful in a million small ways, and the best thing you can do is appreciate that beauty.
Don’t be silent. Don’t let go. Hold on tighter and listen to Afterglow.