MORNING’S GLORY

The mid-morning sun cut through half-closed curtains and broke the bedroom’s darkness with piercing, scattered shards of light. Half-blinded by an absolute prick of a sunbeam and using my hand as a visor, I opened up the book at the foot of the bed, squinting, read the first page, closed it, and bought it on my phone. It showed up two days later: The Odyssey. I dragged it around for the next year, dog-eared to hell, proselytizing the virtues of this 3,000-year-old swashbuckling, poetic, madcap shitshow of fun to whoever would listen. 

If you’ve read it—and a shouldn’t-be-surprising number of people I know have and were half-annoyed, half-amused by my new fervor for it—none of this will be new to you. But the hero of the original epic was a motherfucker. Odysseus was a liar, cheat, philanderer, murderer, thief; a vengeful, petty asshole; and more than kind of a shithead. He was also a brilliant tactician, a clever son of a bitch, a romantic, a man of a series of complex and spiderwebbing and overlapping principles, and nothing if not persistent. Every day, for ten years—after gods and goddesses and seas and skies all conspired against him—he woke up, pointed toward home, and got to work. 

It shouldn’t surprise me that, like large swaths of civilization, I somehow found one of the oldest stories in recorded history to be relatable and totally readable, but there it is.  

I know.

Two more things, and then we’re done with Homer.

The first: In a New York Times Magazine profile of Wilson before her translation came out, a critic named Guy Davenport is quoted: “The ‘Iliad’ is a poem about force; the ‘Odyssey’ is a poem about the triumph of the mind over force.”

The second is this: ever since I read that aforementioned epigraph about “rosy-fingered dawn,” those words have been somewhere in my head every day, every moment since. Not always at the forefront, or even close—sometimes, they’re all the way in the cut, deep in the cheap seats. But they’re there. I think of them every time I wake up and when I’m crashing. I think of them at night, in bars with loud, thumping music and light-up dance floors, in prewar buildings, in glass skyscrapers, in theaters, in restaurants, in the office, in the office bathroom, in my morning shower. I think of them in tunnels and over bridges, on planes above the cloud cover. I think of them as those last pink streaks of sunlight are cauterized into the topaz hues of early evening dusk. I think of them at nearly every time except for one: rosy-fingered dawn.

I am not a morning person.

I’ve never really been one. And I wish I were. I wish I could speak of rosy-fingered dawn to its hand. 

Every time I think of rosy-fingered dawn, my heart breaks a little knowing what I’ve missed—that it’s just right there. It’s just right there for the taking.

I love the mornings. I love the smell of black coffee, the scents and aural textures of breakfast being made: someone sleepily shuffling around a kitchen, disrupting the soft silence with their bumbling movements, clanking around.

I love the way the sounds feel like they’re either trying too hard for softness or not at all. The sweet, concordant chirps of a dawn chorus of birds decimated by a garbage truck slamming a dumpster back to the ground; a faucet creaking on a turn, followed by a shower blasting a percussive drumline of hot water on an empty bath’s surface; even the classically shrill, serrated trilling of a digital alarm clock over a soft moan and pillows and sheets ruffled in the darkness as a warm body shuffles over, hits the snooze button, and turns back toward you for one more moment, trying to stay silent, still, so you both can maybe get another moment’s rest and warmth and sweetness, together. 

It’s not that I’ve never experienced these things. I have. But I haven’t embraced them in a way that might reflect just how much I’ve loved them, not at the depth I’ve wanted, not with my wingspan fully outstretched, reaching into rosy-fingered dawn as I wish I had each time it's fled by as I've slept, blissfully unaware—until, all at once, I am. 

And I always am. 

It’s caused me my fair share of problems. I’ve been getting shit for being late in the mornings for a long time, so I’m used to it. My solution, of course, was not to address the problem itself but to eventually work my way into positions where people didn’t give a shit at what time I rolled in. That plan, it shouldn’t surprise anyone, hasn’t always worked out perfectly. I’ve heard it all: Have more respect for your coworkers who can get here on time. You’re looked at as a leader, and it doesn’t count that you stay late. Everyone else can do it, why can’t you? And so on. 

And then there are the other problems. 

I’ve never been the person to hit the alarm clock. I’ve always been the person someone else has quietly shuffled over for. And I’ve always told myself, after those moments, that I just hadn’t found someone worth hitting the button for. 

Or a reason to get up early enough. Early and often.

Or that there was, and has always been, something wrong with me.  

Turns out, there is.

This feels like something that you probably already know, but for the sake of putting the anchor in the wall, let’s state that it’s true: There’s actually a biological difference between morning people and not-morning people. (Or, I guess you could say, night people.) 

Circadian rhythm is a real thing and not just some semi-science-y bullshit. So-called self-designated “bicoastals” saying they’re jet-lagged might, unfortunately, have a physiological pardon (though not one that absolves them for being the kind of asshole who refers to themselves as “bicoastal”).   

Here’s how it works: Your circadian systems regulate your biological schedule. They respond to environmental factors like light and sound and eating schedules; they make you sleepy (by telling your brain to secrete melatonin, for example). They keep you going to the bathroom at, ideally, regular times. These systems (and rhythms) are present in all kinds of biological forms all over the world: humans, animals, plants, even fungi. In 2017, a Nobel Prize went to a scientist who discovered the way the circadian systems of fruit flies work on a molecular level. (The guy was a guest on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! If you’re the kind of person who enjoys Wait Wait, and I am, shit was pretty funny. Paula Poundstone gave him the third degree.) 

Where this system concerns us and this whole morning-person mess, is the binary under which we break down into two types: larks and owls, morning people and night people. 

Larks keep an earlier schedule. They get tired earlier in the night; they go to bed earlier in the night; they wake up earlier in the day. Then you have owls—yes, night owls—who are “phase-delayed.”As in, the phases that most people run through earlier in the night are delayed in them. They get tired later in the night and wake up later in the morning. 

With enough practice, one can, supposedly, become a morning person—and one might want to. In the August 2019 issue of medical journal Sleep Medicine, there’s a study that concludes: “Resetting the late timing of ‘night owls’ has a positive impact on mental health and performance.” Sleep scientists tried to flip night owls into morning people without sleep drugs, and they succeeded. They used “light exposure, fixed meal times, caffeine intake, and exercise”—all the boring shit we should be doing anyway. And, of course, people’s lives got better from the study. “Significant improvements to self-reported depression and stress, as well as improved cognitive and physical performance measures,” the paper’s abstract brags. In addition to the basic stress of going against societal norms and the nine-to-five of it all, night owls are, per the scientists, “associated with health issues, mood disturbances, poorer performance and increased mortality rates.”

If you’re not a morning person, the mere act of missing the sun rising—of not being able to take advantage of a full day—can already make you feel like you’re somehow behind from the moment you wake up. 

Maybe I like mornings, but not enough. 

Or maybe I am, in fact, a “night person.” I might just be someone who feels most at ease and able in the most social and loneliest of hours—both the most raging parts of parties and most desolate moments before dawn. Sometimes this is exhilarating; often, it’s alienating; occasionally, it’s devastating. 

Maybe it’s one big lesson in the inextricable agony of life that is: we are who we fucking are, and we can’t change, but we can fight it. And if we somehow manage to win that fight enough times, again and again and again, maybe the nature of that fight changes, and it frees us to go after whatever’s over that horizon. I’ve seen it done. 

Maybe we are just a bunch of recursions. 

There’s a line from the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Pierce Brosnan, all smarmy and Brosnan-like, gives Rene Russo one of those cutting glances, and says, “I don’t have time for regrets.”

In high school, or whenever I saw it, I thought that was pretty fucking cool and regrets weren’t worth accommodating, schedule-wise. And my arrogant 17-year-old ass figured that, like Pierce Brosnan, regret was something only worth crumpling up and bank-shotting into the trash somewhere between Psych 2 and AP Lit. 

But when I try to square away regret as what’s required to get to the perfect present we project to others, I can’t stick the landing on the philosophical gymnastics. I stumble on the implications. Like: My decisions have all been the right ones. Or: There’s nothing in my past I would change. And: Mistakes? Fine, they were made. I made them, but change them? Never, because they led me to the place I am today.

The idea that we should absolve ourselves of regret is psychotic. Regret, like its cousins shame and remorse, exists both in the moment and in a potential future to prevent us from doing the same fuckup shit again. Regret is a healthy spectre we tether to so it can haunt us forever. A land without ghosts is a place nobody’s lived. It’s suspect. I regret so many of the mornings I didn’t get up when the alarm went off. Most of them, really.

(There was, in fact, one time in my life when I was a morning person, when I experienced rosy-fingered dawn as it happened. It’s how I know what awaits me, what I’m missing when I sleep. Its rewards and meditative properties were resplendent, and I felt more connected with the world in those moments than at any other point in time in my life. 

I was 14. It was 1999. It lasted for a year.)

I came to terms with not being a morning person a while ago, because I come alive at night in a way that feels good to me. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t agonize about the alternative, seriously consider its inherent risks, or pine for its beauty, its sounds, its smells—this world apart from mine. I will. I always will. 

I remember with diamond-grade clarity the few mornings I’ve been awake at dawn in the last decade, and in the last year, specifically, there’ve been two: One was at a wedding in Siracusa, Sicily. After a late-night tryst on a concrete embankment overlooking the Mediterranean—sleazy-stupid wedding fun—I went back to one of the hotels where the party was still raging and we drunkenly cheered the sun to life. It felt like a hilarious, dumb dream. I saw rosy-fingered dawn, but it didn’t feel like the one I’m after. 

The other was here, in the city. I was running late to an early morning flight at Newark and had to take a car from Brooklyn across Manhattan to New Jersey. Over the Williamsburg Bridge and into a placid, quiet Chinatown, through the Hudson Tunnel, and then past the Jersey meadowlands where geese launched in v-formations above the marshes. I remember thinking about rosy-fingered dawn in that cab ride and, taking out my headphones, looking out onto Manhattan at the way the sun hit the skyline at its back. The elemental, looming titans of the city; these industrial, insane houses and engines of capitalism and commerce’s finest in their unrelenting, resolute, stoic, immobility being unwillfully painted—softened, really—by the pastels and peachfuzz aura of morning light that sings into the city softly the same way night leaves.

It’s always been funny to me, the way “dawn chorus” only refers to birds, as though humans don’t sing our own morning songs, too. We do. Without experiencing it regularly, I know in the marrow of my bones: 

A city creaking to life is relieved of the chaos and the mystery of the darker hours when we all go a little nuts. It awakens in unnatural, wonderful ways. The trains start running more often. Coffee carts are rolled out. Bodegas see not those ambling in half-drunk for a debauched late-night snack and some brown bags, but people getting a breakfast sandwich on the way to work, maybe the paper—thrown in stacks that slam on the sidewalk (KA-THUNK) just before the sun starts to crack the night sky open into morning. The nocturnals among us are put away and a different kind of animal activity—dogs walking, people running—begins to bring the orchestral swell of a day in a city to a rise. 

Maybe the most simple thing I miss when I don’t wake up early is just that: a street sweeper truck trudging by; watching the many Walks of Shame on a parkside bench in Washington Square Park as the sun cuts through the archway—or being one of them (and god only knows). The light that touches every waking motion of New York City, fills it with an unmistakably unique élan. Even when it’s gray and flat, it’s still morning. 

You know, that kind of thing. 

I love that light. I loved that cab ride. I remember it better than wherever I flew away to. 

Maybe it was Colorado. 

I loved being reminded of how distinct our universal, reliable, great, and bittersweet inculcation is, and how many times I’d fucked up by missing all it had to offer, in all of its resplendence, every morning. Miles Davis had this line: he said it took him years to learn how to play like himself. That morning light, for me, is the sheet music of a new day in the city: another shot, another toss, another roll, another run, another opportunity to get it wrong or fuck something up the same way you’ve done it so many times before, something you will continue to fail at even if you find some success, something you just won’t fucking abide, accept, let be the way it is. Another reset, some hope, another chance to become something you’re not, someone who does the thing that you have failed at again and again and again and yet does it again, anyway. And maybe someone who gets up before seven. 

Maybe I’ve found a new reason to get up and hit the button before someone else. I haven’t tried it yet. I’m gonna give it a go tomorrow. I’ll probably fuck it up. But that’s all right. You know how it goes. 

Dawn always appears, always early, and always rosy-fingered.