The City of Temporary Light

I’m flying to California on Tuesday for Alvin’s brother’s wedding.  I get to be a groomsman and wear a rented tux for the first time; it’s all very exciting.

My only regret really is that I’ll be missing most of the Festival of Lights in Berlin, an event that I’ve developed a strange nostalgia for, if it is possible to have nostalgia for something that you experienced for the first time last year.

During this Festival, which doesn’t really come with the usual German festival trappings like bratwurst and gluhwein and annoyed parents but somehow gets to be called a festival anyways, the city’s major landmarks are lit up by so-called “light artists.”  The website promises, and let’s just use the stilted English here, to “turn Berlin into a sparkling metropolis with a firework of illuminations and events for two weeks.”  The landmarks “will be staged impressively by means of light, events, projections and fireworks.”

It’s really all quite nice, the TV tower in blue, the Brandenburg Gate in reds and green, the Victory Column in yellow.  And as the festival more-or-less coincided with my arrival in Berlin last year, I didn’t know it was a special thing for a festival.  I’d take dark morning runs through Tiergarten, past romantically floodlit statues and monuments, and it was all somehow magical, until of course the Festival ended, everything turned that rather particular shade of Berlin gray, and I realized that the whole thing was a big put-on. 

So my nostalgia is somehow inextricably bound up with disappointment and loss.  Which is, I guess, what makes it nostalgic to begin with.