Short days, long shadows
![Memorial Hall, lion](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2004/01/23-lion-2.jpg)
The winter sun, “a sadder light than waning moon,” though its warmth is feeble and its everyday life brief, shines with a frigid clarity that creates its own hard beauty. Winter air is rarefied, that is, less dense, and so in the clear sunlight, objects are revealed in all their textured detail – outlines are harder, colors richer, shadows longer. In the Yard, in the unaltered light, leafless trees, stark statuary, and classic architecture seem pared down, truer, more themselves.
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![The Yard in](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2004/01/24-cold1-225-2.jpg)
![Sever Hall](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2004/01/24-cold2-450-2.jpg)