The Harvest Moon Meander

With Labor Day, the "Official" end of Summer is past. Well, strictly speaking, the end of Summer comes with the Equinox, which will be around the 22nd of this month. Here in the Northen Hemisphere, it's the Autumnal Equinox, while in the Southern Hemisphere, it's technically the Spring Equinox (although they probably still call it the Autumnal rather than Vernal because when that kind of thing got named, there were more name-givers in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern. That's why North is "up" on the vast majority of maps.)

An Equinox is a mystical moment in time when the Night and the Day are equal, or, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, "One of the two periods in the year when the days and nights are equal in length all over the earth, owing to the sun's crossing the equator." You might wonder about the equality of night and day. It certainly would seem to be an application of the whole concept of "separate but equal." The Bible, for example, describes in Genesis that the sun and moon were created at least partially for the purpose of separating night and day. Similarly, the Qu'ran says that day was created to cover the night, "which is in haste to follow it."

What if the Night were to be equal to the Day in other ways than length? When I was in Dallas last week, the temperature seemed to have that form of equality in mind. And in Alaska, during the "anti-equinoxes" (i.e. the Solstices), the amount of light approaches equality from the Night to the Day. It will be more difficult to imagine this equality making it to literature and music... I don't expect to see any of the following:

  • Tenessee Williams writing The Day of the Iguana
  • The Beatles singing It was a Hard Night's Day
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn writing A Night in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  • Shakespeare penning the play Twelfth Day
  • Mildred and Patty Hill composing a veritable tradition with their new song "Happy Birth Night To You"
  • The introduction of a traditional Christmas tune "Silent Day"
  • ...

Phone in comments to 310.210.3347, meil 'em to the postal address skillfully concealed elsewhere on this page, or email 'em to samuelg@themeander.org

Zuma beach bluffs.
  • "Foreign objects removed from people's bodies" by A Reliable Source
  • "Abiyoyo" by Pete Seeger from Pete Seeger's Story Telling Book by Pete Seeger and Paul DuBois Jacobs
  • excerpts from The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg
  • "What Happened on September 16th in History" by Yarranet.com
  • "Soul Window" by Francis Della Vecchia
  • "Yop" by Pete Seeger from Pete Seeger's Story Telling Book by Pete Seeger and Paul DuBois Jacobs
  • excerpts from All the Pretty Horses by Cormack McCarthy

All misspellings, misattributions, omissions or errors in naming should be construed as Acts of God, directed through yours truly (for reasons at which we as mere mortals may only guess...)