Musings on Translucence
“It’s such a beautiful thing… such a mesmerizing quality,” I thought to myself as I relaxed recently at Fort Desoto Beach, Florida, in my low-slung beach chair looking out at the sea. My mind was adrift in the wonder of what we call “translucence:”
“It’s there but not. It’s substantial, but it’s lighter than air. The color, depth, and softness it adds to things is inexplicable. When I stand waist-deep in translucent coastal waters, my blue-and-white board shorts, tanned legs, and feet seem captured in a dream. They’re there, but they’re awash in otherworldliness. The absoluteness of their colors and forms are blurred. Not lost, not deranged, but blurred by beauty. It’s a good blurring. I can travel through this translucence as a beauty-explorer. It’s as much a dimension as it is a reality.”
After returning from the beach that day, washing away the sand and salt, and sitting down with a cold beer, I kept musing about translucence. I was refreshed by unusually warm dictionary definitions that so often seem wooden and cold.
Merriam-Webster: permits the passage of light, diffusing it so that objects beyond cannot be seen clearly
Cambridge Dictionary: If an object or a substance is translucent, it is almost transparent, allowing some light through it in an attractive way
Google: (of a substance) allowing light, but not detailed shapes, to pass through; semitransparent.
Latin etymology: translucent, lit. ‘shining through,’ from the verb translucere which is derived from trans (through) and lucere (to shine)
In wake of these definitions, I kept musing:
“Translucence is an other-world where light and color dance on an ethereal plane… a place where they’re both present in all their beauty, but their beauty is beautifully bent and intertwined in this dance. In this enchanting other-world, color and form and line exist, but in a mysterious, beauty-morphed way. The translucent sea is the epitome of this sublime phenomenon. It transports. Boats sail upon the pass into the open sea on a translucent canvas. Is it actually there? It is, but in a different dimension of beauty, it seems.”
What do you dream when you dream of translucence?