Learning to Receive the Day

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 1

Welcome to Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture, both broadly conceived. “Broadly” is an important modifier, as the nature of today's, more meditative installment will demonstrate. This post also comes in at around 1000 words, a length of post I’d like to include in the mix more often. Of course, I cheated by throwing another 300+ words in the footnotes. Nevertheless! Finally, if you’re new-ish to the Convivial Society and this post seems weird to you, consult footnote no. 2. As always, thank you for reading.

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Last March, I found myself walking a wooded path just as the sun was setting. To my surprise, as the light of day gradually withdrew, I experienced an involuntary easing of the tension I had not even realized I was carrying around my neck and shoulders. Muscles relaxed, my breathing slowed and deepened. What most caught my attention was that I did not consciously intend any of that. It seemed to happen simply because my body was attuned to aspects of the environment that signaled a time for rest and renewal. This set me to thinking about how infrequently I enjoyed such an experience of gradual transition from one part of the day to the next, from one state of mind and body to another.¹ With help from the late Czech philosopher, Erazim Kohák, I went on to reflect (inadequately, I know) on the meaning of the transitions from agricultural to industrial to digital time. “We are not only creatures of the light,” Kohák counseled his readers. “We are creatures of the rhythm of day and night, and the night, too, is our dwelling place.”

I recall all of this, nearly a year later, to introduce a brief—I think, we’ll see—companion reflection anchored to the other end of the diurnal cycle: the break of dawn and the rising of the sun.²

In this case, I found myself taking a two-hour drive southbound on the interstate beginning around 6 AM. When I left, it was still completely dark without even the moon to dimly illuminate the sky. Given the subject of the last installment, I’ll note, too, that I chose to ride in silence. It was good.

George Inness, Sunrise (c. 1892)

Around 6:30 or 6:40, I noticed the first bit of light appearing along the eastern horizon. This light was gentle and at first barely perceptible, manifesting mostly as a trace of pink coloring a bit of the sky, the first intimations of the arrival of rosy-fingered Dawn, in Homer’s memorable epithet. There was a gentle beauty in what was unfolding, enough to offer some unlooked-for, although welcome consolation.

But that is not what set me thinking. As the time continued to pass and I continued to (safely!) steal gazes at dawn’s progression, I was again struck by the gradual nature of the affair. The light filled the sky and the new day arrived in unhurried and leisurely fashion. I could not rush it along or urge it to pick up its pace. I could not make it answer to my demands, should I have had any to make. All I could do was to wait.³

It recalled the somewhat archaic phrase “to receive the day.” It is not, I don’t think, a phrase we are likely to often hear.⁴ But these were the words that gathered around my experience as I reflected upon it.

So much of the way we carry on each day, empowered by our technological array, encourages us to presume an extraordinary degree of control and power over the world. [Warning: sweeping claim incoming.] Indeed, the project of technological modernity was explicitly pursued under the banner of just such mastery over nature.⁵ And, by and large, its achievements have been real and substantial, if perhaps also precarious, unevenly distributed, and freighted with costs that are becoming increasingly evident.

But the sun is gloriously indifferent to my desires and pretensions. It cares not whether I would slow or speed its arrival. A fact that, and this is a crucial point, eludes my apprehension most days of the year because I am simply not paying attention or even situated so that I could pay attention.

But there I was, up at o-dark-thirty, careening down the highway and unable to resist the lure of the beautiful display unfolding out my window.

[Aside: I alluded above, incidentally, to the fact that I was driving in silence. I wonder now whether this was not a more important condition than I initially believed. I suspect that were I listening to music or to a podcast, I would still have noticed the increasingly resplendent sunrise, but I do wonder whether I would have thought about it, reflected on it, sought its meaning (the thing Hannah Arendt argued that all thinking was ultimately after) had silence not prepared and inclined me to do so.]

So I noticed with pleasure and considered with profit that I could do nothing but wait on the light and attend to its arrival. I could not rush the day or command it. All I could do was receive it. And, better yet, receive it with humility and gratitude. And it was good for me to feel this deeply, to be formed in this way. In one sense, of course, I would have affirmed the relevant propositions had I never taken this drive. But it is one thing to assent to or even articulate a proposition, it is quite another, as it turns out, to perceive a truth, if we may call it so, viscerally and poetically, as it was manifested in this compelling this intermingling of mind, body, and world. This, too, is a message of the medium.

And, of course, the sun finally did arrive near the end of my journey, bearing one final message. (Dickinson was right, “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.”) To experience the gradual arrival of the day in this way—to learn what it means to receive the day—is also to receive another, seemingly paradoxical gift: the gift of a beginning and the possibilities that come with it. Night buried yesterday. Now we rise to something new. If waiting on the day suggests a constraint, a lack power to effect our will, it is nonetheless such waiting that then discloses to us the gift of freedom, the gift of knowing, in an empowering and vivifying manner, that today need not be as yesterday was.

1. I’m grateful to Jeff Johnson, who interviewed me later in the year about this essay for his podcast, Nature Junkie Radio. That episode came out not too long ago and you can listen to it here.

2. Look, I’m possibly overly sensitive to the fact that many of you have signed up recently, possibly under some hazy impression that I write about technology, and may at this point be wondering where this is going and who told you that I wrote about technology anyway and what were they thinking. Fair. Fair. This is why I say that I write about technology, culture, and the moral life all broadly understood! My perspective is that we should certainly consider instances of technology and technological systems in their particularity and concrete specificity, etc. But we should also consider larger patterns of social and cultural change that emerge as our material environment changes, and that we should consider both what can be measure and what we cannot measure—matters of meaning, say, or of moral judgement beyond instance of measurable harm (in fact, the tendency to “see” and evaluate only what can be measured is just such a larger, hard to quantify cultural pattern). Anyway, so, yes, this probably reads more like a mediation than a critical essay on technology, but I’m afraid that’s just part of what you’ll get here from time to time.

3. Speculative digression: By contrast, the phenomenology of the switch (or even of the digital binary itself … too speculative perhaps) teaches us both that things will answer to our demands instantaneously and that all things must be either one thing or the other and that there is no relation between the two. It is this or it is that. The one does not participate in the other, they do not gradually yield from one to the other with an intermingling and participation of being such as we see in the dawn or evening sky.

4. Of course, the somewhat obvious, but too-cute move here is to oppose “receive the day” to the far more well-known “seize the day.” I’ve resisted … sort of.

5. To which we must always add Lewis’s observation in The Abolition of Man, that power over nature meant also, power over the human being insofar as the human being came to be construed as just one more element of nature, and, critically, what this meant in practice was the power of certain human beings over others.