sense of time

on time

diurnal A view of time that surfaces the daily and seasonal fluctuations between the clarity of day and the mystery of night.

references & inspiration
	Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? - Dave Eggers, The Circle		Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night. You can't fight it. - Haruki Murakami
	We have been conditioned to think of the darkness as a place of danger, even death. But the darkness can also be a place of freedom and possibility, a place of equality. We have much to learn about unknowing. Uncertainty can be productive, even sublime. - James Bridle, New Dark Age		Only in the clear night of dread's Nothingness is what-is as such revealed in all its original overtness. - Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being
	For millennia before clocks, our only regular way of measuring time had been the alternation of day and night. The rhythm of day followed by night also regulates the lives of plants and animals. Diurnal rhythms are ubiquitous in the natural world. They are essential to life, and it seems to me probable that they played a key role in the very origin of life on Earth, since an oscillation is required to set a mechanism in motion. Living organisms are full of clocks of various kinds - molecular, neuronal, chemical, hormonal - each of them more or less in tune with the others. There are chemical mechanisms that keep to a twenty-four-hour rhythm even in the the biochemistry of single cells. - Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time		We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light-his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. - Jun'ichiro Tanizako, In Praise of Shadows