Complex Numbers

The Longest Night

Sat., Dec. 22, 2007, 1:08 A.M. EST (06:08 UT), marks the solstice—the beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/wintersolstice1.html

For those of us situated to the north of the Earth's equator, tonight is the longest night of the year.

Where I am, the sun has already set and the Night has begun, and it will not end until 7:27 am tomorrow.

My life isn't particularly dark right now. It's a good life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. Okay, I'd like my back pain to go away, but other than that I have no real complaints.

It hasn't always been like that. Like most people, I've had my ups and downs, and I fully expect I'll continue to have them. The ups are like summer: sunny, carefree, bright, cheerful. The downs? Well, there's a lot of fake "cheer" going around these days, usually bedecked in red and green with a price tag swinging from it in the snow-flecked breeze, but I don't find much cheerful about winter. I mean, in winter, through the longest nights, we have to make our own cheer, be it bright lights, dancing fires, the company of friends and lovers.

The ups and downs of the seasons are fairly predictable. Not so those of humans. I suppose many of us suffer from seasonal depression. Not me. I just get depressed at random times. Then I get, "What do you have to be depressed about? You have such a great life! Friends, family, people who care, and all the stuff you've ever wanted!" and so on. And so I feel guilty about feeling bad in the midst of all of that, which makes me feel even worse, which leads to more protestations on the part of well-meaning friends, which makes me want to go away from them, which makes things worse, until I, for no reason I can ever properly elucidate, feel like I'm living my own longest night.

See, people are always telling me to "count my blessings." It was one of my mother's favorite phrases. I never did fully understand it. "Count your blessings," she'd say. Like when you're lying awake at night and instead of fluffy white sheep hopping a fence, you see little blessings - whatever the fuck they look like - and you can fall right asleep. It's not that I can't count my blessings; it's not that I can't be thankful for all that I have.

It's that I'm scared shitless that I'll lose it all.

On the solstice, I have in the past had a personal tradition to remain awake all night in a kind of vigil, to force myself to endure Nature's longest night in hopes that it will, through some psychology or sympathetic magic, allow me to withstand my personal ones.

I don't know if I can do that tonight. I didn't sleep well last night, and I'm not sure I can stay awake. I'm not sure if I want to. I've done the vigil a few times, and I think I've gotten out of it what I need to.

The night is no darker than any other, really. In fact, tonight it should be even brighter than usual - it's almost a full moon, and even if it's cloudy, the clouds will shine from the reflected fake cheer hung from everyone's trees and houses. It's a bright enough night, but neither moon nor blinking red and green lights can hold a candle to the light of the Sun. As dawn approaches, the light intensifies, and its quality becomes crepuscular. I love that word - crepuscular - and I don't get to use it often enough. "Of or pertaining to twilight." For a while, the world hangs in the crepuscular balance between night and day and then - slowly, so slowly that you can no more detect it than you can detect the movement of the hour hand on an analog clock - the day begins.

Dawn doesn't break; it melts.

As it has done since before human history, the world wakes up from its long night as a sliver of sun peers over the horizon. In contrast to the steady melting of night into day, it takes a surprisingly short time for the solar disk to crest the horizon - at which point you're really not supposed to look at it anymore, but I figure the UV has been scattered away and I have just a few seconds to contemplate that which makes life possible here on this remote speck of a world, so small in the universe yet so large to us.

It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?

Sunrise: one of the few things that we can say with certainty that it will happen tomorrow. Because it defines tomorrow.

It's not long before I have to look away. The light is only burned on my retinas for a few short moments, but it's burned into my memory forever: There will be a tomorrow, and things will cycle back to summer.

Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun.
Oh but Mama,
That's where the fun is.