Illimitable Blue

Occasionally the public is admitted in small numbers to an otherwise closed exhibit. They enter silently and allow themselves to group in the center of the room; arranging their feet by small movements to avoid others, squaring their shoulders under coats, rolling the cloth of their umbrellas tight in their hands and easing the points down carefully along a leg to the floor.

The doors are sealed after them, the room darkened, and at a signal the ceiling is quietly rolled back revealing a vision of the sky unlike any seen in the world before. The room floods with an illimitable blue.

It excites in them a rhapsody, a waterfall of sensation. None uses the words of anyone else to describe it. They can scarcely control their hands. Their ecstasies illuminate in them the rich processions of the equinox.

After, as the sky is closing, they hear from outside, from fathomable distance, from a grillwork of crusted snow: a leaf crack underfoot; indistinguishable from gunshot. The sound of it leaps at them and bounces, dizzyingly, wall to wall. No one has the least idea how to say what has happened.