{"id":7583,"date":"2020-05-15T16:24:37","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T21:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=7583"},"modified":"2020-05-15T23:01:04","modified_gmt":"2020-05-16T04:01:04","slug":"goodbye-may-13th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=7583","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye May 13th"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the end of another day, the sky is just about dark, and the moon or Venus might already be visible. You&#8217;re walking towards the west, along a road going over the top of a minor elevation. Hopefully you have a flashlight, because you&#8217;re not in the city.  Everything around you is dark and murky and quiet. And yet, you notice something through the bare tree branches, far off in the distance. A faint red-orange glow outlining the silhouette of the western hills. The last bit of fading light from the day that just ended.  Goodbye to another day. You&#8217;re reminded of the line from the poem &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poems\/43891\/today-56d222c50bc78\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Today<\/a>&#8221; by the Victorian English author Thomas Carlyle  &#8212; <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Out of Eternity this new Day is born;<br \/>\nInto Eternity, at night, will return.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When I was younger, I felt a &#8220;twinge&#8221; in my mind from sights and thoughts like that. It was some sort of a deep reverberation about the essence of life, something to do with the pure feeling of being. Your eyes might even start getting just a little moist. Whatever happened to that feeling? Where did it go?<\/p>\n<p>The other night I was taking an early evening walk, and I happened upon such a scene. I stood there for a moment beholding it. And I almost felt the &#8220;existential twinge&#8221; once more. I wondered it if was OK to feel anything like that, surrounded as I was by a world in a pandemic. Despite all of the bad news coming at us almost constantly, I still felt something of a sentimentality for the passing of another day. Goodbye May 13th, or whatever it was that we called you. Thanks for letting me be a little part of your story, and thanks for becoming a little part of my own story.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s take a look at the lines from Carlyle&#8217;s poem that follows the famous &#8220;Eternity&#8221; couplet &#8212;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Behold it aforetime, no eye ever did:<br \/>\nSo soon it forever from all eyes is hid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There&#8217;s something about the transition from day to night that evokes a sort of un-named emotion. Even the word &#8220;twilight&#8221; has an almost mystical air about it; it would sound profound even if you didn&#8217;t speak a word of English (I think). <\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a pic showing the purple twilight of a different day, taken from a different place.  I hope that you too have had moments like this when you have felt &#8220;the twinge&#8221;.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jimgworld.com\/beta\/twilight_montclair.jpg\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the end of another day, the sky is just about dark, and the moon or Venus might already be visible. You&#8217;re walking towards the west, along a road going over the top of a minor elevation. Hopefully you have a flashlight, because you&#8217;re not in the city. Everything around you is dark and murky [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7583"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7583"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7589,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7583\/revisions\/7589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}