The Sun in my hand, and in a barn

Less than two weeks ago, I posted "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," the title being a line spoken by Doctor Octopus in one of the Spider-Man movies. Today I ran across this in a used bookstore:

According to the summary on Wikipedia, Klara is an intelligent robot that observes the outside world through a window and "watches the Sun, which she always refers to as 'he' and treats as a living entity."

From Josie's bedroom Klara has a good view of the Sun's progress across the sky, and comes to believe that he goes to his nightly rest within a farmer's barn that stands on the horizon.

The idea that an "AI" would not have access to basic information about the Sun is just a bit hard to swallow, but it certainly made for a striking sync.

In yesterday's post "Not in the well," I discuss the children's book Wake Up, Sun!, in which a dog and pig look for the Sun in a well. After that, the next place they think to look is behind a barn.

In the Ishiguro novel, Klara's reason for thinking the Sun sleeps in the barn is presumably that the barn "stands on the horizon," so that the Sun appears either to set behind it or rise from behind it (depending on whether the barn is in the east or the west). In Wake Up, Sun! the Sun also appears to rise from behind the barn.

Earlier, the animals had attempted to wake up the Sun by "yelling" (i.e. making their respective animal sounds) in the night:

In the same bookstore where I found the Ishiguro novel, I also found a children's book called The Moon Dropped, a translation by Mei-hwa Li of a Chinese story by Jin-Lin Jang. In the story, some frogs find a yellow balloon and believe that the Moon has fallen to earth. They try to get the Moon back into the sky by croaking loudly at night.

It's the Moon, not the Sun, but it still seems closely related.

Yellow balloons have been in the sync stream before. Most recently, in the music video for "Grapes of Wrath" (see "Rock my Audible"), Brian Bell has a yellow balloon stand in for him in a group Zoom call.

Earlier, the yellow balloon appeared as a sync symbol associated with Dee, Kelley, and Dee Kelley in "Another link between John Dee and DeForest Kelley" (2022) and "Caster and the yellow balloon" (2025).