A few thoughts on the last day of Daylight Saving Time — or do you say Daylight Savings Time? Either seems acceptable. Either way, it’s oddly named.
What are we “saving” with Daylight Saving Time? Daylight? Time? Both? And what, if anything, are we saving it for? A rainy day? Our solar batteries? Sustaining our sanity through the long winter ahead?
At least “Daylight Saving” sounds soulful, as opposed to Central … Standard … Time, which lowers the boom … of doom … and gloom.
The end of Daylight Saving arrived early this year. It happens the first full weekend of November. Next year the first full weekend is Nov. 7-8. An extra week of extra daylight! For some of us, deeply appreciated. Maybe you prefer your extra daylight in the morning, but even that is short-lived as we creep closer to the solstice and the hegemony of moon and stars over sunlight.
We are shifting from Daylight Saving to Daylight Losing — for the next two months anyway. After December, we enter Gradual Daylight Comeback Time — until March when we vault forward an hour, back into blissful evening light.
The only reasonable argument I’ve heard for changing our clocks is that if we didn’t, the dawn in June would rouse us at 4:30.
There is no benefit whatsoever for falling back to Central … Standard … Time.
So why not stick with Daylight Saving all year round? Conventional thinking seems the culprit — it’s how we’ve always done it.
Regardless, for the next 50-some days we’re in Nightlight Saving Time as we steadily lose the light of day. Why double down then, assaulting our light-craving psyches with this extra onset of darkness?
It’s as if we take delight in de-light, painfully evident in our “celebration” of the dark side each Halloween, otherwise known as skeleton-mania, bones on every lawn, tombstones and ghostly wraiths of every sort — a time when the veil between this side and that side of reality is at its thinnest, according to folklorists.
On this, the morning after All Hallow’s Eve, which makes Nov. 1 All Hallow’s Day — which this year coincides with the last day of Daylight Saving — I pass a father standing over a large deflated witch on his front lawn. He gathers the sad remains in his arms — as gently as if it were the remains of a close friend who chose to say goodbye to life itself — and carries it back to the space where it will rest for another year.
I continue along the pathways where empty candy wrappers compete for sidewalk space with the fallen leaves.
Fall is upon us, but the falling has just begun. So many leaves still stubbornly cling to trees, awaiting their denouement, when the bare and barren branches can no longer bear their leafy burden and more closely resemble exposed nerve endings against the iron-grey sky.
This is what losing looks like, when the trees’ only adornments are the few stars viewed through branches in the night sky overhead, a reminder of James Joyce’s elegant “heaventree … hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
What were we saving daylight for if not now? Yes, a few weeks of extra light in the morning to savor before we lose that too, but for what? To make our way to the barn to milk the cows? Apparently not. Farmers (and their cows) reportedly oppose these biannual time shifts.
It’s as if we deliberately choose this deprivation of daylight, this withdrawal within.
Time to lose ourselves in the Saturnalia of candle-lit holidays, saving daylight for another season, another dawn that we know will come. Must come. Can’t come too soon. We outline our living with strung lights, flickering fireplaces, fellowship, and incandescent living-room trees — compensating for daylight loss and celebrating Nightlight Saving Time, as if shining out to the naked nightly universe were enough. And, for a while anyway, it helps.
Our annual exercise in irrationality, this inexplicable shifting of clocks, this surrendering to the dark, this substitute for the loss of light, however, won’t feel half as bad as last year’s Daylight Losing, post-election, four-month eclipse, trapping us inside its unsolvable film noir mystery.
So goodbye, light. Hello, night. It’s time to flip our switch.
We’re saving daylight for the coming of spring.