DAY TWO: THE PRETTY LIGHTS

I love driving at night. I have always found the dual set of lights on the road fascinating: red in front of me in my lane, and receding in my rear view mirror, white coming toward me in the opposite lane and behind me in the mirror. In the daytime the highway is just populated with cars going with me or coming at me, obstacles to surmount, avoid, get around. In my lane are the people going with me, or at least going my way; on the other side of the highway are those going to where I came from. At night the relationship becomes richer somehow. The people, the cars, to some degree even the road are stripped away; it becomes a complex sequence – or organization at least – of lights, one that if find less easy to categorize. The red lights are in front of me, are sharing my direction, are closer to my destination; but they are also closer to where I came from in my rear view mirror. At night I become the center point of the light show of travel. I am the center of around which all these other possibilities move; the white lights converging upon me, the red lights moving away. But even that is too much of a simplification. I am a mobile center, overtaking some of the red lights before me, transforming them from red to white. With the landscape stripped down, I get the sense that I am the center of the universe; small shifts in my speed perform radical alterations of my environment.

Thus, what I think about when I drive at night, which I find far more fulfilling than daytime driving – when I just play Pole Position.