“Bright pools of electric glare” outside a cinema in John Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer” (1925)

In John Dos Passos's "Manhattan Transfer" (1925), in a scene that takes place in the early 1910s, before the outbreak of World War One (given an earlier reference to the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and a later reference to Sarajevo), dancer Cassandra (Cassie) Wilkins and her boyfriend Morris McAvoy leave a cinema: "They came out of the movie blinking into bright pools of electric glare." What strikes me about this is how often that is my own experience of coming out of a cinema, especially when the movie started before night fell: I am very aware of the "bright pools of electric glare", and often quite disoriented by the nighttime lights. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 July 2024)