Peri Dwyer Worrell

All this tweeting about the sun setting an hour earlier starting on Sunday and how sad and depressing and forlorn life’s gonna get is only so much manipulative and mendacious gaslighting. These pearl-clutchers want to make us think that Standard Time is some vestigial cruelty of a bygone era; that the sheer perversity of short winter days and long winter nights must be blamed on negligent, misanthropic senators rather than on the tilt of the earth’s axis at 23.44º. As if we as a civilized society in the Current Year should have long since moved past leaving work after sunset! Yet somehow these weepers and wailers never bring up the obvious corollary: shouldn’t we in the Big ’26 have long since moved past going *to* work *before sunrise*? They don’t bring this up not because it doesn’t occur to them, but because it doesn’t cater to their goals. No, for them, sunlight in the evening matters; sunlight in the morning does not. Why? Because the former gets us focused on leisure, entertainment, golf, halloween candy, and commercial profit; the latter gets us focused on vigor, work, and study by day, followed by quiet rest and deep sleep by night. The former fills their pockets; the latter makes us sane. We should relish our quiet, dark, fall and winter evenings! They’re delicious. They’re a healing balm after the activity not only of the day now over – a day that was energized by bright, early-morning sunshine – but also that of the long, verdant and vibrant summer now past. But these people don’t want us to enjoy winter evenings at home, inside, in warmth and peace, with all the interior contentment and contemplative coziness that are bound up in that great but now rare word: “hearth.” Part of the problem, of course, is that we either can’t or won’t learn how to make our own homes places of beauty, places where we *want* to be. Instead we flood them with overhead lighting and fill them with screens, so that even when we’re at home, we’re not. And I bet there’s a big overlap in the Venn diagram between the permanent-DST-foisters and the people who started this trend of mounting TVs directly above fireplaces – so as to gut even the idea of the memory of what a quiet family hearth might be like. In the U.S., the year used to be evenly split between standard time and daylight saving. That still wasn’t ideal. But then Big Candy and Big Golf got standard time reduced to only a third of the year: November through February. It’s only during those four months that midday is truly at noon and midnight truly at midnight. In the other eight months, we set the clocks an hour fast – we get up an hour earlier – and thus we can pretend that the sun goes down later. So for all you corporate pearl-clutchers out there howling and writhing as this weekend approaches: what’s your motive? Cui bono? (Painting: Adriaen van Ostade, A Talk by the Fireplace, c. 1640)