On Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning and Morning Sun, by Sarah Haas

Cape Cod Morning, by Edward Hopper (USA) 1950

On Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning and Morning Sun 

I’ve been taught to think of myself as lonely. Inherited the lesson, like a house, that oh so American assumption: to hold loneliness close. To keep loneliness precious. As if there was something about the vastness of this place, this American land, that was meant to make us feel all alone. Maybe the lesson is of solitude, of humility, of that ineffable feeling of being one pine among the barren. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s less about my incredible smallness than it is about the wanting, the desperate wanting, the looking at the window for the company that never quite comes. Me, a woman, sitting pretty in her pink dress, watching another sunset as if it were the same as dawn.

Sarah Haas

Sarah Haas: "I’m a writer and critic living off-grid in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. My recent work has been published in Lit Hub, Longreads, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, among others."

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Morning Sun, by Edward Hopper (USA) 1952