Tuesday, June 22, 2004
The Longest Day
Yesterday, June 21, was the longest day of the year, at least for countries in the Northern Hemisphere. (Apologies to all my readers in Madagascar and Micronesia, who still have six months to go.) This day has always had a special significance for me, at first for no other reason than that it was the day on which I got the most time to run around in the yard pretending I was a superspy and throwing rocks at my sister. (Small rocks; no permanent damage was done.) As I’ve gotten older, however, June 21 has become less about projectiles and more about maximizing experience, about taking a moment to recognize the joys of living life before I run out of quarters and most likely just miss that great list of high scores in the sky.
There’s a passage from The Great Gatsby I’ve always loved that incorporates June 21. Daisy comments that every year she looks forward to the longest day of the year but somehow fails to notice it when it arrives. Of course, it’s a wonderfully real little character detail, since Daisy is full of whims she never quite follows through on, but to me it’s also sort of the story of all of us, passionately longing for things in the abstract (love, happiness, respect) but somehow losing them in the details when they’re right before us. There are so many distractions in the world that even our most primal desires can get buried under a heap of Tatu albums and infomercials for spray-on hair. And the desire for light, which, after all, does give life to every single thing on this planet, is probably the most basic of them all. That’s why people become assholes in winter—they don’t like coming home from work in the dark any more than you do.
So anyway, I now try to memorialize June 21 in some way every year, in hopes that my recognition of one important life force will lead to greater awareness of all the elements that make up that profound absurdity we call existence. Last night it was as simple as a glass of wine on my roof at sunset, coupled with the thought that, yes, from this point on there aren’t quite as many minutes in the day or as many days in a lifetime. And then I chucked a couple of rocks at passersby, just for good measure.
Yesterday, June 21, was the longest day of the year, at least for countries in the Northern Hemisphere. (Apologies to all my readers in Madagascar and Micronesia, who still have six months to go.) This day has always had a special significance for me, at first for no other reason than that it was the day on which I got the most time to run around in the yard pretending I was a superspy and throwing rocks at my sister. (Small rocks; no permanent damage was done.) As I’ve gotten older, however, June 21 has become less about projectiles and more about maximizing experience, about taking a moment to recognize the joys of living life before I run out of quarters and most likely just miss that great list of high scores in the sky.
There’s a passage from The Great Gatsby I’ve always loved that incorporates June 21. Daisy comments that every year she looks forward to the longest day of the year but somehow fails to notice it when it arrives. Of course, it’s a wonderfully real little character detail, since Daisy is full of whims she never quite follows through on, but to me it’s also sort of the story of all of us, passionately longing for things in the abstract (love, happiness, respect) but somehow losing them in the details when they’re right before us. There are so many distractions in the world that even our most primal desires can get buried under a heap of Tatu albums and infomercials for spray-on hair. And the desire for light, which, after all, does give life to every single thing on this planet, is probably the most basic of them all. That’s why people become assholes in winter—they don’t like coming home from work in the dark any more than you do.
So anyway, I now try to memorialize June 21 in some way every year, in hopes that my recognition of one important life force will lead to greater awareness of all the elements that make up that profound absurdity we call existence. Last night it was as simple as a glass of wine on my roof at sunset, coupled with the thought that, yes, from this point on there aren’t quite as many minutes in the day or as many days in a lifetime. And then I chucked a couple of rocks at passersby, just for good measure.
