In winter, we yearn for the comfort of light

Rene Magritte (1898-1967), a Belgian surrealist artist, executed a series of paintings titled "L'Empire des Lumieres" (The Empire of Lights). The basic composition is made up of a glowing street lamp and lights in the windows of a house on a residential street at night.

But above the black silhouette of stately trees around the property, the sky is pale blue with puffs of white clouds.

Explaining this surreal image, Magritte said: "This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us."

I recall seeing a similar scene with my own eyes when I was living in Belgium. It's hard to put it in scientific terms, but the phenomenon was probably caused by atmospheric conditions peculiar to the region. I saw it for a fleeting second right after sunset in late autumn or early winter when nights were getting longer.

In the semi-darkness of twilight, the eyes and ears sense something that couldn't be really there.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have walked on a street at twilight and inexplicably sensed the presence of someone I knew who was already deceased. In Japan, such time of day is called oma-ga-toki, which means the time you could meet with a mishap.

As if to dispel such an illusion, cities are now being lit up brightly for the holiday season.

In the Roppongi Hills complex in central Tokyo, tiny LEDs sparkle all over the Japanese garden, and the keyaki (zelkova) trees that line the street are laden with glowing bluish "nuts."

High-rise hotels compete by having their windows lit in patterns of gigantic Christmas trees.

The combination of the black night sky and the day-like brightness of the lights below is Magritte's paintings in reverse, but cities indeed become the "empire of lights" until the year-end.

The endless "daytime" brings out families and couples to enjoy the sights. But while the glittering night certainly takes everyone to a fantasy world, the scenery there is for real, not an illusion.

Winter makes the heart yearn for the warmth of glowing light, especially when it is the only spot or ray of light in the darkness.

Tora-san, the protagonist of a popular movie series, "Otoko wa Tsurai yo" (It's tough being a man), sensed the ultimate comfort of humdrum family life in a lone light from the window of a traveling night train.

That sort of light, which stirs one's deepest longing for affection, is an extremely "rare commodity" nowadays.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 14(IHT/Asahi: November 23,2009)