“One discovers the sunshine in darkness, that’s what darkness is for; however all the things in our lives depends upon how we bear the sunshine,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest, least known essays.
In his exquisite memoir of the search for inner light, the blind resistance hero Jacques Lusseyran wrote in the identical period: “Nothing on the earth, not even what I noticed inside myself with closed eyelids, was exterior this nice miracle of sunshine.”
That search comes ablaze with unusual tenderness in I Touched the Sun (public library) by musician and graphic novelist Leah Hayes — the story of a younger boy’s quest to seek out and bear his personal mild.
One morning, warmed by the sunshine of daybreak, the boy awakes overcome by the need to the touch the solar.
His mom tells him it’s not possible — the solar is much too far. His father tells him it’s not possible — the solar is just too scorching to the touch. His older brother, sipping soda by his bike, meets the hunt with indifference.
And so the boy decides to go by himself.
He closes his eyes and launches into the sky. When he lands on the solar, he bends all the way down to greet her and she or he embraces him whats up together with her nice yellow arms.
We see the boy peeking from the sky onto a seaside scene because the solar exhibits him the place she works.
We see him admiring a vibrant flower as she exhibits him “what she’s made.”
She confirmed me issues that look her years to develop…
…and issues that solely lasted seconds.
Carrying the story is the quiet dialog between the black-and-white simplicity of Hayes’s pencil and the incandescent richness of her crayons, emanating the candor of a kid’s drawing and the refined subtlety of an artist’s lens on the world — a world of contrasts within the act of being made on the web page, like a younger life nonetheless unwritten, but to be coloured in with dwelling.
Earlier than the boy leaves, he asks the solar one easy, immense query: The place does her mild come from?
From inside, she tells him, touching his coronary heart.
Immediately, a vibrant interior solar comes ablaze inside him — the sunshine he at all times carried, “not too scorching, however good,” now discovered.
The solar inside started to shine outward. It made me really feel good with mild, like I might get up the world with simply my contact.
So illuminated, the boy feels able to return house and embraces the solar goodbye earlier than flying again all the way down to Earth, the place he finds his mom mesmerized by the beautiful sundown aglow exterior.
She doesn’t appear to note something has modified in him. Nor does his father as he carries the sleepy youngster up the steps.
However looking his bed room window into the night time sky, the boy is aware of, the boy feels that the sunshine is at all times and already there.
Couple I Touched the Sun with Before I Grew Up — a soulful illustrated meditation on life and our seek for mild — then savor Mary Ruefle’s magnificent poem “Kiss of the Sun.”
And in case you are nonetheless looking for your individual mild, take rapturous assurance from Nina Simone:
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; images by Maria Popova
