How
did I miss the solstice? In the
winter it can’t come to soon. Every
dark day onward you know there’s a turning point looming. The day will come as it always does where
the receding daylight will gather itself and finally, gradually begin to mount
it’s counter attack. In the summer
time the suns sets late and you’re content with that, and you don’t pay it any
mind when that day passes by and before you know it the light is in
retreat.
I think it came to mind for me the other day when I was
wrapping up something around 7:00PM.
It was getting dark out.
Wait a minute. Isn’t that a
little early for the sun to go down?
I checked the date in my mind and realized that this was as good as it
would get. The day before was the solstice. And here in Shanghai, which is on the same longitude as a
place like Savannah Georgia, much closer to the Tropic of Cancer than I
normally am, the late summer evenings aren’t all that late. And the dread winter darkness isn’t all
that dreadful.
I’ll be back in Beijing this weekend. It's longitude is similar to New
York. There, in my memory, we had
long summer evenings where the light lingered till well after 8:00PM. And this takes some of the mystery out
of it but my “feelings” about all this are, quite easily verifiable with about
eleven seconds of effort. The sun
will indeed set at 8:30PM in New York City tonight. The sun will set here in Shanghai at 7:01PM this evening,
while up in Beijing the sun will disappear at 7:47PM. (Interestingly Google search automatically populates the
first two times, if you enter “sunset time Shanghai” or for New York, but it
does not, if you put in “sunset time Beijing.”)
Wrought this way, one can appreciate “daylight savings
time.” I normally regard it as a
nuisance, a U.S. entitlement. And
it was always spoken about as if it were something for farmers. But if the sun really went down at
4:30PM in the winter in New York it would certainly affect the whole
workday. I bet it had more to do
with bankers than farmers making that change., always looking to 收之桑榆[1] the way they do. And just as there is something mean and paltry about
a sun disappearing at 4:30PM, it is utterly magical to have the fading sunlight
linger till nearly 9:00PM.
I’ve been to Oulu in the north of Finland in December. The sun rises after 10:00AM and
disappears again by 2:00PM. I
thought all the women in the office were applying makeup during their coffee
breaks, as they were all sitting around brightly lit individual mirrors. These were, rather devices to
approximate sunlight. And I
have been to Reykjavik in Iceland during late May. You appreciate draperies in a place like this. The sun drops down at nearly 2:00AM and
returns again, demanding before 4:00AM.
Fluctuations of these extremes must have scarred the Viking sense of
normalcy.
The Hong Kong ballot exercise I referenced yesterday has had
a much broader participation rate than was initially suggested. Rather than four percent, it would
appear that closer to nine percent of the population have participated in the
“illegal” polling which asks people to choose among different mechanism for
selecting candidates and thus far over 600K citizens have participated. This represents a full 1/6 the
voting population itself. Schemes
involve such outlandish ideas as allowing for write-in candidates.
Now it appears that the web site of the provocatively named
“Occupy Hong Kong with Peace and Love” movement has been subjected to one of the
“most severe cyber attacks of its kind.” Using compromised servers in Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere the movement’s platform was pummelled with distributed-denial of service attacks by
a “herder” server that remains untraceable. Like the first known state cyber attack by Russia against
Estonia in 2007, this achieves little, tarnishes the reputation of the attacker
and sharpens the resolve of everyone else involved. How much easier it would be to simply make the polling
official and reckon with what the population had to say. Beijing needn’t acquiesce to anything
in the end, necessarily. But these
blunt attacks will only sharpen people’s resolve and push them further away
from what Beijing would like to see.
Louis Hayes is still keeping time today as he was yesterday
behind the confident punchy sound of Nat Adderley on coronet. Nat, the younger brother of the famous
alto player Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley, is sounding like he’s in the other
room this morning on this lovely tune “This Man’s Dream” from the 1961 session
“Naturally.” The two of them
apparently went armed and ready to play to an Oscar Pettiford gig at Café
Bohemia in Greenwich Village in 1955.
The regular sax player was out and first Cannonball and then Nat were
invited up on stage and they successively set about to blow everyone away. Sometime before sunrise that evening
they knew they’d made it.
[1] shōuzhīsāngyú: to lose at sunrise but gain at sunset
(idiom); to compensate later for one's earlier loss / what you lose on the
swings you gain on the roundabouts
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