Since retiring I have been spending more time looking at clouds.
I recognize there may be something a bit cliched about that, or too quaint, but not wanting to go into these conditions wherein I look at clouds so much, I can say that said conditions are pretty bland. I am not lying in some magical grass meadow or anything. But there, nevertheless, I am, and there are the clouds, and sometimes I look at them a lot. That's just how it is.
So you may ask: Is this place I live in so particularly good at clouds?
Every place in the world, on the right day, is good at clouds. That's just how clouds are. So no, not in particular
But this place, the Cote d'Azur, seems to do particularly well at very volumetric, very clear, complicated, and grand clouds. More than once I have gotten all photography about them and served you up all sorts of pictures, mangled this way and that, to try to get the point of their sheer wonderfulness across to you. Whether I did or did not get that point across would be up to you and your long search through the clerkmanifesto archives. But this is not my mission today, and I have no new pictures.
I was really just watching the clouds.
And I noticed something about them.
There is something miraculously pitched about the speed of clouds.
Clouds move at a speed just fast enough for us to notice, but one has to look for it. At first glance they seem to be stilled, a set tableau. And while one can see the movement and change with an applied concentration, each moment seems fixed, the scene casually appears to be a settled one, but the movement of the clouds nevertheless happens at the fastest possible speed for that fixed quality to still be true. As I watched the clouds I could see the movement, but the sky did not seem to be changing. Yet if I turned my attention, or looked away for even just a handful seconds, looking back to the sky I would find a very different scene.
What does this all mean? You might ask.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
But probably a bit more than most of things you might find here on the Internet today, which, come to think of it, might move at just about the same speed.
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