Day Labors: a conversation between Night and Day on the circuits of human affairs 

Day enters, and sits down next to Night. He turns and sighs.

Night: Is that you, Day? Aren’t you back early?

Day: Maybe a few minutes, at this time of year. But I’m looking to rest before starting again tomorrow.

Night: You seem more tired than usual.

Day: Not more tired, just frustrated. If you witnessed what I see, you would be too.

Night: What do you mean?

Day: As I look around, I find it hard to keep track of all the wickedness in the world. I see people working at false purposes, striving to cheat one another. I see others taking pride in the littlest, most passing accomplishments, as if you deserved a trophy for whistling through your nose or wiggling your ears. And then there are those who presume great things about themselves for being popular through their writings, their acting, their politics, or their business success. Most of them are genuine actors without realizing it, showing faces and aspects that other people expect. And even more ridiculous are the crowds of people who praise them for their performances, and feed their vanity, and those who envy their success. There is the story of Croesus, King of the Lydians, who wished to be counted among the happiest of humankind. He asked Solon, the exiled Athenian statesman, to acknowledge this imagining, only to hear Solon reply that the happiest person he knew was a common citizen, content with his condition. And Chuang-Tzu, asked to be prime minister, told the imperial emissaries he would rather be a turtle, dragging its tail in the mud, than be venerated but lifeless at the palace. But how many seek the royal stage!

Night: When you think about it, it is amazing.

Day: Amazing, yet I would not believe it if I alone saw these things, but in fact they are open to anyone who cares to look. One does not have to be a hare to know that there are hawks. What ambition, what search for gain, what thirst for attention, what greed courses through people’s lives! And this is only one mark of their foolishness and self-deception, as they strive to distract themselves from knowing who they are. They measure their worth according to their bank accounts or the influential people they know. And how they lose sleep over imagined pricks to their bubble reputation! They have no time for the truth of the poet, “How more than a day is mortal life? Fragile and brief, cold and full of pain, it can appear beautiful, but does not remain.”

Night: When you speak of sleep, you are entering my realm.

Day: Yes, if only they would rest from their designs.

Night: I would tell you what I see another time.

Day: My point is that the Yin virtues – patience, gratitude, and contentment – have almost disappeared, and people extend their lives with unhappiness. They may live longer, and see out more months and years, but do they live healthier lives? I circle the world to illuminate their lives, and to see how they enjoy a world of sunlight and growth, but they walk only with greater feebleness, misshapen and uncomprehending. Rather than deepening their roots on the earth, and draw energy from the world around them, they hasten from place to place, prize to prize, notice to notice, running rounds of disquiet. The world becomes, in their words, the “environment,” that which surrounds them, but it is always at arm’s length: a source of study, of bother, but seldom on wonder, seldom do they think themselves a part of it. They are in the world, and the world is always with them.

Night: What of the Yang virtues – fortitude, determination, perseverance? I see some awaken before sunrise in efforts to become more productive; I shine, in the darkness, on writers, thinkers, poets, and inventors, solitary folk, who find their light in the solitary darkness.

Day: Are they happy? Or are their ambitions, too, only a source, and consequence, of inner anxiety?

Night: Well, I see those in love, too, whose happiness runs past the finish line, only to lap the course again. But for many others, love, or its lack, has hobbled them. And when I see their dreams as they sleep, they teem with restless images, storm-tossed. They show their efforts to gauge how much they fail to meet their imagined goals. The unfortunate ones, in their loneliness, are happy not to remember these dreams, and to start their waking hours with only the melancholy resonance of sleep’s raveled unrest. Few are those that have “no figures nor no fantasies which busy care draws in the brains of men” and so sleep soundly.

Day: You have set me on my course again. For under my view, these people go off to work and hide their lives of quiet desperation. Their associates, relatives, even their friends are unaware of their secret distress, or unconcerned about it. In the ship of social life, they go about their assigned tasks, all of them, without giving a second thought to the course of its passage. Where did their journey begin, and where will it end? It falls to you to view whether these questions have meaning for them.

Night: I see they have given you much to think about.

Day: Not so much to think about, as to witness.

Night: It is time to rest.

Day: Yes, and turn over our chores and cares to our child Dusk, who will prepare your entrance.