Evening Sky, Missoula, Montana

" As he walked back, alone on the hilly road, the evening sky took on a tremulous violet-blue that filled in and grew deeper until, suddenly luminescent and silvered, it faded to black. "In life," he had said to Orland, futilely staunching his dead brother's wound, "we are in death." Nothing lasts. Every moment is a moment passing and gone.
Yet, as he walked, and dusk faded to night, that violet-blue stayed with him in its essence, calling up his longing in the bottom of a trench for the whole sky.  It was above him now, vast and star-filled. Every star the brighter for the depth of unending darkness....
Angus walked down to the end of the wharf and felt a release that filled the sky.  Beauty had not abandoned him. He'd abandoned it. On the battlefield he'd risked life in the midst of death. And he had not risked it since. He closed his eyes and let the stars fall around him."
- From "The Cartographer of No Man's Land" by P.S. Duffy
(Wonderful book I just finished, by the way, and highly recommend.)