LAST CALL: Here Comes the Sun
Malenic, Marina
LAST CA M A R I LENIC Here Comes the Sun MERICANS HAVE THROUGHOUT THEIR HISTORY been P instructed on the benefits of starting the day early. That foremost American sage Benjamin Franklin...
...Moreover, many a Night Owl scorns the Early Bird as a dull disciplinarian, often noting how much more romantic the world appears during the Owl's waking hours...
...In Walden, Henry David Thoreau included various tributes to morning, on one occasion calling it the "most memorable season of the day...
...While the world and everything in it seem new at daybreak, the sounds of nightfall—insects chirping, tomcats meowing, and finally silence—while uniquely charming, are the sounds of loss...
...Night, despite her repulsive aspects, does offer a view of the world all mortals find compelling—the twilight, the remains of the day, the nearing of the end of all worldly things...
...The former are our Early Birds...
...A sunrise certainly differs from a sunset, and now that I've experienced both regularly, I find myself somewhat partial to the former...
...Which makes perfect sense, as the event was a literal GOtterdeimmerung, long before civilizational apocalypse became fashionable...
...But perhaps morning simply hasn't been given proper consideration in that particular contest...
...While a spring sunrise is greeted by the fresh scent of dewy lawns and the sound of—quite appropriately—the song of eager birds, the sunset is offered as the centerpiece of a more melancholy setting...
...And American schoolchildren are still taught that "the Early Bird catches the worm"—although I can remember as a squeamish little girl interpreting this maxim innovatively, as warning rather than encouragement...
...After all, the romance of a new beginning is undeniable...
...The latter are known by the common name Night Owl...
...As a newly evolved Early Bird, I've come to face the fact that the world is indeed populated by two distinct types of individuals—morning people and night people...
...I've found that the sense of accomplishment an early start brings to a writer will often result in a more prolific yield throughout the day...
...And with her arrival on Earth, all the worlds seem new again...
...The Ancient Greek poet Hesiod explained in his Theogony that Night, one of the Greeks' oldest deities, dwells in a "gloomy residence" and that "ghastly clouds shroud her dwelling-place in darkness...
...In the Odyssey, Homer portrays her arrival in a golden chariot, and in the Iliad her son Memnon dies at the hands of Achilles in the Trojan War, his mother's tears becoming the morning dew...
...That foremost American sage Benjamin Franklin advised, "early to bed, early to rise," wisdom that somehow rings true long after his - mainly agrarian society—for which a strictly regimented day was essential—has ceased to exist...
...1/4...
...According to Hesiod, Night gave birth to sons Hypnos and Thanatos—sleep and death—two fellows you definitely don't want around if the mood is romance...
...The author of this wisdom, this proto-Early Bird, rural Asian ancestor of the modern city bird, was probably more closely related to the early American specimens of afeather with Franklin...
...Indeed, an ancient Chinese proverb claims that "three early risings make an extra day...
...Nonetheless he was on to something...
...Now that I find myself awake well before the dawn every day, I've begun to realize that one of the benefits of early mornings can be more waking hours...
...The light of dawn 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 dances onto the scene gracefully and fearlessly, inspiring hope in its audience, unlike the waning evening light of sunset, sneaking out behind the curtain with little fanfare...
...The Early Birds tend to look upon the Night Owls as their slightly slower, perhaps somewhat moodier cousins...
...This spring the twilight brings with it a rare planetary alignment, with Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn all clustered in the western sky in a showy display at the setting of the sun—a cosmic arrangement the Greeks looked upon as a forbidding omen...
...Night Owls can find the overly energetic Early Birds a bit, well, annoying...
...But by the following morning Mars, Venus, and the rest of the Olympians are easily outshone by the rosy-fingered, saffron-robed goddess...
...By contrast, the great Homer refers in both his Iliad and Odyssey to Dawn by turns as the "rosy-fingered," the "saffron-robed," the "early-rising," and the "golden-throned" goddess who ascends Olympus to announce to the immortals the arrival of the new day...
Vol. 37 • May 2004 • No. 4
