The Aquarium

Being a rainy day in Autumn, the light outside has a certain greenish quality. Even from a distance at which the rain itself isn’t visible, the air looks wet, perhaps because the light is bouncing off thousands and thousands of drenched leaves.

From where I sit at the dining room table, when I look through the front windows almost all I can see is leaves, and few glimpses of branch. I have to search with care to identify a speck of apartment building across the street.

With the wind, the leaves move, now gently, now vigorously. The effect of this combination of drenched air, subdued, watery light, and moving greenness is to make it seem like I’m looking out a picture window in a submarine at the undersea foliage.

But no, the foliage is too big for that comparison. A better one by far:

I am a little, tiny being inside the head of a tropical fish. In his head, I have an apartment, and the big picture window in the living room is one of his eyes. And from where I sit, one room distant from the eye-window, I am looking at a mass of aquarium plants, moving with the current. If I were to get close enough to the eye-window and look to the right, I would see the aerator releasing an endless cloud of little bubbles. And if I watch long enough, I’ll see the flakes of fish food floating down through the water-air. But when that happens, I won’t look up, because then I’d see, distorted by the water in between, the gigantic fingers dribbling the food flakes from above, and beyond those fingers, I’d be able to make out the features of a face as big as the sky, and maybe it would be my face.

(c) 2007 Shmuel Goldsmith