Hats and Infinity

I always wear a hat. In winter, because it’s cold; in summer, because it’s hot. I never questioned the habit, beyond a mild irritation at my hair’s tendency to invade my eyes and mouth when left uncontained. It was a closed, uncomplicated story, until a few days ago, when I found myself wondering why weather sites insist on giving both the temperature and the perceived temperature. The discrepancy was striking, five degrees, with no wind to account for it. It was time to investigate.

What I discovered was quite unnerving. The clear night sky is not just a romantic or perplexing backdrop, it actively drains warmth from us. Our infrared radiation escapes straight into space. The sky is an active absorber, an infinite cold. This is called radiative cooling.

There is something profoundly unsettling about this. We stand on solid ground, reassured by its reliability, and above us is a vastness that quietly siphons our warmth into nothing. The sky gives us light, perspective, orientation, and at the same time it takes. The infinite, majestic sky saps the tiny warmth from us, ephemeral, microscopic creatures. And we stand upright, columns that link the mortal ground to infinity.

Allen Ginsberg once told Steven Taylor that when you feel trapped, you should look up. There was a Buddhist undertone to it, the idea that the mind, like the sky, is larger than its weather. That thought, fear, despair are not the space itself, only what passes through it.

In Aleksandre Koberidze’s film What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, the title, at first, sounds innocent, almost childlike. But it is not asking about clouds, or sunsets, or stars. It is asking about projection. About whether we ever see what is there, or only what we need to see in order to be the protagonists of our own story. When we look at the sky, do we encounter infinity, or do we deposit longing? Meaning is life, but our individual lives are not central, perhaps not even to ourselves. In the film, children and dogs see the sky as space that is only as relevant as their depth of field.

Perhaps my hat is a way of shielding my adult self from the cold of infinity.