Following the Sun Read Online Free PDF

tides, ice ages, and the vast, ill-understood cycles of heat and magnetism on the sun’s surface affect the internal cellular and hormonal rhythms of all the living things of the earth. Green plants, the source of all animal life, though fixed in place on the ground, have elaborate and still not entirely understood mechanisms for tracking the sun’s daily course across the sky and through the year. All animals are subject to these same rhythms of light, everything from sleep, to seasonal hormonal changes, to migration or hibernation, digestion, the sex of certain cold-blooded species, and even, it turns out, mood swings in higher mammals, such as human beings.
    Even the most atheistic of scientists will admit that, in its magnitude, its veritable power, in its measureless, unknowable inner heart, the sun is very like a god. Like nothing else we know, it breaks down the apparent split between science and spirit. It is both myth and fact, factual and mythological, spiritual and physical, ethereal and material, and there is no escaping its power.
    Whichever creation story one believes, the fact remains that every day on earth a large rounded ball of bright fire appears over the eastern horizon and spreads a vast cone of light across the section of earth on which you, the observer, happen to be standing. Even in winter this benevolent light has warmth in it. You can feel it on a January day if you pick the right spot. And this warmth, this heat, this light, this great coursing chariot of blazing flame, is the source of all life on an otherwise cold and lifeless planet called earth. From the sun all things proceed.
    That first day of spring outside Cádiz I was feeling the effects of the god of the sun, whoever he or she may be, having spent too much time on the beach the day before with Dickey and her mother.
    The morning after our night on the town I had gone out for coffee and sat reading a local paper on the promenade near Dickey’s hotel. It was the sort of day I had been waiting for—a misty warmth, with the smells of the freshly washed streets rising all around and mixing with the smells of the coffee and hot milk and fresh bread. Later that morning Dickey had emerged, and we made plans to go to the beach in the afternoon. I spent the rest of the morning poking around the town looking for a bicycle shop to get a strap fixed on one of my panniers and then rode out to the appointed beach not far from the city.
    By the time I got there, the spring sun was burning with a sort of cool freshness, and even though it was still early in the season there were many northern Europeans at the beach that day. Dickey had brought her mother along, a somewhat rounded woman in her early sixties who reminded me a little of one of the early chthonic figurines fashioned by the Paleolithic cave worshipping folk. Without any self-consciousness, she and Dickey stripped off their tops, arranged their towels, and lay back to bask in the spring sun. They had traveled a great deal in Europe, I gathered, and were seasoned beachgoers.
    Sun-worshiper though I am, I actually don’t like simply lying out and basking, I much prefer to walk along a beach looking for adventures, so I left them basking and took a walk. All along the shores, people in various stages of dishabille were stretched out flat or walking along the sand, and a few of them, probably German or Scandinavian, were swimming in the still cold waters of the Atlantic. Here were blond well-muscled German Apollos in tiny male bikinis, and there were many topless goddesses, basking or chatting in little groups. One young couple, possibly Swedish, blond, tanned, and stripped naked, was standing with their backs to the water, their faces turned up to the sun so as to better accept its benevolent rays which, I presumed, had been so long denied to them through the long dark winter.
    As the day progressed, the sun grew hotter, and more and more winter migrants began to appear,