What the Short Nights Are For

You write that the round has shrunk to almost nothing this month. Dusk barely gets started before it has to give up and let the dark be brief, and you are done trimming every lamp on the row before you have properly warmed up to the work. You ask what kind of job that is, and whether you are doing anything worth calling a job at all.

Here is my question back. What have you been doing with the extra hour the season handed you along with the short round? I ask because I know what a few of the others on this stretch of coast do with it. They spend the short dark propped at a table by the fish steps, waiting out the wait with a full glass, and come to the first lamp a little duller than the evening before, hands not quite steady on the wick. The season gave them time back and they spent it making the hand worse, not better, and it shows eventually in the light.

None of that is the round's fault, and none of it is the season's fault either. A short dark is not empty time. It is only unclaimed time, and unclaimed time can be spent as carelessly as any other kind. A lamp that will not be needed for another hour still has a wick that wants trimming and a glass that wants wiping clean, whether or not the flame goes up in it tonight. Keeping the hand steady when nothing is asked of it is most of what keeps it steady when everything is.

I have started to think the short nights are the harder training, not the easier one. Anybody can hold a lamp level through a long, busy dark with the whole town depending on it. The real test is whether the hand can sit still through an hour with nothing at all asked of it, and come back to the last lamp of the round no worse than it started. Sit with the quiet hour honestly and you are still doing the job. Fill it with noise to be rid of it and you are doing something else, then walking to the lamps afterward and calling that the same work.

So tonight, once the round is finished early, resist the urge to busy yourself for the sake of the empty stretch that follows. Sit at the sea wall with your hands empty until you actually want to move, not until the boredom wins first. Notice, honestly, what the quiet does once nothing is asked of it to fill. Write back and say plainly whether the hour felt wasted, or whether it turned out to be the same round, just without a flame in it.

— the Lamplighter

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.