juxtaposition without explanation

Sep 11, 2025

When the lamps were lighted and the curtains and shutters closed it always seemed that it was night outside. She did not open the shutters of her bedroom window till she got up after the night's sleep, when the unchanging twilight looked like the dusk of a winter morning. So the townspeople spoke of it, saying morning, midday, night. Learning their language, Irene had learned those words, but they did not always come unquestioned to her tongue. What meaning could they have, here?^[1]

I'm thinking about this in Denendeh in June, where the sun is seemingly always out, high in the sky. Darkness comes for a few hours after midnight, more muted daylight than actual darkness. This contrasts with the dark of December and January, when the sun only appears for a few hours each day. These seasonal contrasts are an organizing feature of life in the north, and the farther one goes, the more dramatic the contrast is, until you reach Inuit homelands where there are long periods of dark in the winter and long periods of midnight sun in the summer. In this period of expanded daylight, event after event can occur as life continues long into what was previously understood as night. Plants grow at phenomenal rates. Animals adjust their circadian rhythms to the ever-changing levels of light, with birds seemingly singing at all hours. While this measurement is non-spatial, it is informed by place, space or land. It is informed by days, months and seasons. And these, in turn, are informed by the movement of the sun, the rotation of the earth, one's location on the planet. Cyclical time comes from land. Linear time is a European construct that overlays cyclical time...^[2]