The Late Hours
As children the late hours of night were scary, eery and considered taboo to be awake then. Being warned of insects running loose in the dark, the mind imagined a hell like floor covered through and through with frightful bugs. Quite literally my mother was taught to see the late night as the “devil’s hour” and such she’d tell us about. But children grow, and so do perspectives. Amidst other lessons growing up brings, and in the new world, time grew too.
Day and night, all the same, the distinctions don’t seem to hold anymore. At all hours different parts of society run, irrespective of the positions of the hands of the clock. And yet everything runs like clockwork, with the analog clock being like a musical conductor maestro of life- waving hands and presenting a tune that we all dance to, like clockwork.
IMAGE CREDITS: ChatGPT and DALL-E 2024.
The new world brings complex societies with all time valued the same, and work that goes on all the time. The delayed or global travellers seeking a cab back home in the night, the video game addicted kids staying up all night to play, and the doctors that work round the clock. Remote working jobs with people communicating around the world, construction and factory crew working on night shifts, and the working professionals that attend night schools. Those who are catching up with a dear friend overseas, city cleaners and technicians working swiftly at night, and the high school and university students who stay up all night to study. Stock brokers stalking overseas markets, the arctic settlers living through a 6-month long night, clubbers dancing through the night and so on, and well you get the idea. As well to most of them, a growing demand supporting the F&B to nourish their nightly food cravings, with 7-11s and midnight restaurants. In the new world, the hotter days compel all to shift to night time operations, for really darkness was vanquished.
What a contrast from the childhood and old world perspective of the late hours.
While my father gets up at 4 am on the dot, it’s been a while since I’ve been up and about early in the morning. At a point there was a time range that I had never been awake (6-7am) for two entire years. The one time that I had been awake then, well I saw an entirely different world - canteen stall owners setting up, gardeners tending to their plants, cleaners clearing up the bins, and such, while a vast majority of those around (university students in this context) dozing away, to wake up later to their next day of work and classes, and all the while the world had yet been running, never still.
