THE SUN IS BOTH OUR CREATOR AND DESTROYER / THE ECONOMIST

The sun is both our creator and destroyer

Our attitude towards it reveals human frailty in all its forms

Out of my windows the sunlight glitters over the sea, gleams from white sails and lies in gilded panes over the garden lawns. 

So I take a book and make for those lawns or the beach, or put on my summer walking shoes with holes in the toes, stuff a notebook in my pocket and catch a bus to the hills. 

All the way I will monitor the good faith of the sun, willing away the clouds that muster on the horizon, feeling those marvellous beams.

But not so fast. 

First I need a hat to keep the radiant intrusion off my face and my neck. 

Then my sunglasses, which cast a sober pall over all the sun is doing. 

And last, the sunscreen, heavy as greasepaint and slathered on liberally. 

Odi et amo, wrote the Roman poet Catullus: I hate and love. 

I long for the sun, yet I rebuff it; I revel in it, but I go prepared for war.

The sun of my childhood was benevolent, a jolly rayed disc laughing from beach toys and cereal packets, making everyone as bright and happy as itself. 

I don’t remember feeling in those days that the sun was ever too hot, even when I sweated in stuffy train carriages in a thick school blazer. 

These discomforts were the fault of British Rail and my school, never the sun, whose energy could make me leap, run and roll in the grass.

Innumerable civilisations have made the sun a god, giving light and life to the world, marking out time, all-seeing. 

The Greeks had Apollo, god of order and poetic metre as well as light, with his hair curling down in golden rays, never to be cut. 

The Gayatri Mantra from the Rig Veda, holiest of all the Hindu mantras, addresses the sun unreservedly. 

Christians in church still face the rising sun, the natural direction for morning prayer.

Yet gods had multiple moods and characters, and the sun was no exception. 

Alongside Apollo came Helios, a more workaday god who drove his chariot from east to west and back again until he was tired, and lingered with lovers until he caused eclipses. 

Egyptians worshipped the sun as Ra, supreme ruler and order-bringer, but also the lesser gods of the sun’s rising, its setting and, in Sekhmet, its scorching of the land. 

Both Sekhmet and the Aztec Huitzilopochtli, whose body was made of the souls of warriors transformed into hummingbirds, were also gods of war. 

The sun was not straightforward: it was light and dark, creator and destroyer, bringer of both plagues and healing, a mass of unpredictable energies.

Even as scientists made the cosmos less mystical and more mechanical, the sun kept its contradictory character. 

It was still glorious and joyful, but man also had the measure of it now, and could order it about. 

Handel’s aria, “Eternal source of light divine”, nonetheless commands the sun, like a servant, to shine with double warmth on Queen Anne’s birthday. 

Decades earlier, John Donne called the sun a “busie old Foole” for shining in on the bed where he lay with his mistress, and mocked it for the time it would take (much longer than Donne) to visit that bed again.

In recent years I’ve come to think more like Donne. 

When I moved to the south coast, the sunniest part of Britain, I revelled in the near-perpetual brightness. 

I even wrote a book about it, rapture from start to finish. 

Now I’ve learned the less alluring side. 

The same sun that fills my home with happiness also bleaches my pictures until only blue survives. 

It dries out the paint around my window frames and turns white sheets a strange shade of yellow. 

The sun that gives me a flattering tan also, after a few hours, burns my skin as drily and fiercely as an oven.

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” begins a song in Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”. 

My blinds now often come down, and I seek out benches in the shade – just as my grandmothers did, never venturing out in summer heat without a broad hat and parasol and a dress buttoned to the neck.

My grandmothers feared that the sun’s touch would make them look like labourers in the fields. 

Our fear is now more existential: cancer. 

The sun is undeniably hotter than it was. 

Thermometers tell us so, as do horrific wildfires. 

I can feel the change myself. 

No other summers burned me as those of 2018 and 2019 did, when the Sussex hills stood like beaten copper and each skeletal gorse-patch was filled with panting sheep. 

The sun was cruel in a way that was new to me.

Despite all that, I can’t shake my devotion to the sun. 

This is partly because, as in childhood, I can blame only us humans for the over-heating of the world. 

It is partly because the sight of the sun still fills me with irresistible happiness. 

But it is mostly my conviction that behind the visible sun lies a power and principle that is even greater, of which our star is merely a reflection and a reminder.

And so, among all my bleached and dried-out things, raising my tanned but moisturised hands, I still direct my prayers to the east.