This evening at Playa Las Muertos in Puerto Vallarta, I watched the sun setting past some couples holding hands and families arranging photos, beyond the footprinted sand, over the waves on the beach and the boats on the waves approaching the beach, at the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. Then when the last bit of its reddening globe disappeared, I heard applause.

There is a kind of applause that is performative. It happens, for example, at the end of a play in a theater or at a rock concert. The audience claps, and sometimes there are several rounds of this, people standing for an ovation, or flicking lighters, and sometimes shouting or whistling. Then the actors come out for several rounds of bows in a preordained order, or the band returns to their microphones to play an encore.

This evening’s applause was not performative. It was not for the sun, which after all was going to set regardless of whether any of us were there to bear witness.

I used to attend Cornell Cinema films frequently in Uris Hall. In 1981, the summer when I was in the pre-college program, I attended perhaps twenty films in a six-week period. Tickets were cheap, the auditorium (unlike the U-Halls — the University Halls where we lived) was air-conditioned, and the movies themselves were interestingly curated. These movies in pre-college and then in college exposed me to a much wider range of films than I had seen before on network TV, HBO, rented VHS tapes, or the theater in isolated small-town Ohio. And then at the end of one of these college movies, sometimes, sometimes but not always, we would clap.

Maybe this evening’s applause for the sunset was a little like this — for ourselves, to express appreciation we were sharing a moment, this singular moment during our mortality, together and never again quite in the same way. I mean it was a bit silly, we weren’t clapping for the projectionist, we were just clapping.

I think the applause, and that for this evening’s sunset, was also spontaneous.

I think it was just spontaneous in the same way that sometimes the passengers on an airplane used to applaud at the end of a routine flight, when the plane’s wheels touched the tarmac. This happened in the years immediately following the 1978 passage of airline deregulation in the US, when there were many people flying for the first time.

We want to do something when something delights us, when we are together, when something happens as it should, even if it may be happening for us for the first time. It is naive, like a child playing peek-a-boo or blowing bubbles with its own saliva, it is beautiful that we should clap.