31 May 2019
One morning in the autumn — probably October — I woke up with the sunrise and looked out my window to a gilded sky. The rising sun hit the clouds at just the right angle, and for a few moments the entire world was golden light streaming in across my sheets, an echo of my first morning in Queenstown: waking in the darkness of a strange hostel room, peering out through the heavy curtains to a sky painted gold behind the still-dark mountains. These are moments of compressed time and space, like a face, displaced but familiar, glimpsed on a crowded street.
For someone so accustomed to the broad sprawl of the Bay Area, Edinburgh is a constant feast for the eyes, a mass of texture and color and bustle and crowded old buildings standing shoulder to shoulder, grumbling and smoking softly in the rain like a group of old men in tweed suits with cigarettes. The city folds and winds in on itself in the most unexpected ways, every new corner and alleyway and set of stairs a hidden treasure, revealing a sliver of glowing countryside or architecture framed by a set of narrow walls and rooftops. Just when I think it is becoming visually familiar to me, I look up instead of down at a certain moment on my walk home and am stopped in my tracks by a view of the Pentlands rising above the apartments circling the Meadows, perfectly set off by the rooftops and bare winter trees. Or, turning a corner on an evening run, Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags — unexpectedly close — lit up by the last rays of sunlight, brilliant and orange. Coming across these views is like stumbling onto a piece of artwork, the whole city its own frame. Far from oppressive, the warren-like feeling of Old Town is exactly what a warren should be: warm, safe, well-worn, familiar, comforting, twisting, protected. This feeling is easy to understand from a particular spot: next to the Flodden Wall in Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, one can look across Grassmarket and Cowgate and past Victoria Street up to the Royal Mile and see the old, old buildings stacked on top one another, chimneys puffing — the city piled up and crowded in like crooked teeth, the texture and color of each building standing out and melting in one after the other.
A moment walking across campus last semester — I looked across the main square to a beautiful grey-brown Georgian building, all tall doorways and wide even windows. It was lit from the inside out with a soft orange light that streamed out onto the wet cobbles, and I thought how beautiful it looked, how soft the colors. It was an oasis of light in a dark December cityscape, where twilight began at half past three and night fell for real not long thereafter. Edinburgh — in the winter — a city turned inwards.
SGBRSH 