John - have you ever read Charles Williams' eerie novel, 'All Hallows' Eve'?  It was written before the true end of WWII; the time of the story is immediately postwar; the setting - London. It is as much about London as it is about anything else.

In the following excerpt, a young man looks at his artist friend's painting of London.

"It [the painting] was a part of London after a raid - he thought, of the City proper, for a shape on the right reminded him of St Paul's.  At the back were a few houses, but the rest of the painting was a wide stretch of desolation. The time was late dawn; the sky was clear; the light came, it seemed at first, from the yet unrisen sun behind the single group of houses.

"the light was the most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting, and almost to dominate the room itself. At least it so governed the painting that all other details and elements were concealed within it. They floated in that imaginary light as the earth does in the sun's.

"The colors were so heightened that they were almost at odds...

"The usual slight distinction between shape and hue seemed wholly to have vanished. Color was more intensely image than it can usually manage to be...A beam of wood painted amber was more than that; it was light which had become amber in order to become wood.

"All that massiveness of color was led by delicate gradations...towards the hidden sun; the eye encountered the gradations in their outward passage and moved inwards towards their source.

"It was then that the style of the painting came fully into its own. The spectator became convinced that the source of that light was not only in that hidden sun; as, localised, it certainly was. 'Here lies the east; does not the day break here?'

"The day did, but the light did not.  The eye, nearing that particular day, realized that it was leaving the whole fullness of the light behind.  It was everywhere in the painting - concealed in houses and in their projected shadows, lying in ambush in the Cathedral, opening in the rubble, vivid in the vividness of the sky.  It would everywhere have burst through, had it not chosen rather to be shaped into forms, and to restrain and change its greatness in the colours of those lesser forms.  It was universal, and lived.

'Richard said at last - I wish you could have shown the sun.

'Yes', said Jonathan [the painter]. 'Why?'

'Because then I might have known whether the light's in the sun or the sun's in the light...'

'...you approve?'

"It's far and away the best thing you've done', Richard answered. "it's almost the only thing you've done - now you've done it.  It's like a modern Creation of the World, or at least, a Creation of London.  How did you come to do it?'

"Sir Joshua Reynolds,' said Jonathan, 'Once alluded to 'common observation and a plain understanding' as the source of all art.  I should like to think that I agreed with Sir Joshua here".

Dumbledoresarmy,