One of the minor marvels of sunsets is that phone cameras cannot capture them well. This much is known.
One of the slightly less minor marvels of sunsets is that phone cameras cannot even provide a good portal back to their beauty. If I take a picture by an ice-cream stand on a summer afternoon, the camera will not capture the texture of the heat, nor the physicality of the cone, but it will remind me of these things, and I might think that I remember that day.
Not so with sunsets. All I'm left with is leaden swath of color.
I'm often tempted to think of myself as a noun. I, as a thing, am a body, with a collections of other things arrayed about me, an assortment of friends I've made, and a set of achievements of memories. Sure, I do things, but only as a noun does them. A baseball bat is a baseball bat, whether or not it hits a ball.
Phones flatter this thought, because all day, they collect. They gather the places I've been, the things I've seen, even most of the words I say. Little is lost; everything else is offered out to me on a platter. Except for sunsets.
Sunsets remind me that I am a verb. The collections of things around me are not passive stuff; they are objects that I relate to. I wear clothes, I write on paper, I walk in shoes. My friends are not flowers in a notebook; we're only friends because we act as friends together. Even my memories, the last things I would have if you took everything else from me, are things which I can only access by living them from scratch, every time.
So yes, I am a verb. I verb. "To be" is a verb. All I can do is live in the narrow strip between yesterday and tomorrow, no matter what anyone says. No matter what my phone offers me.
So as I look out at this sunset, this glorious panoramic view over Berkeley, I cannot capture it in any meaningful way. All I can do is live this moment so vividly that when I remember this day, I still feel the tremors.