Photo of the Day: First Sunset After Daylight Saving Time Change

Somehow I wish the period from the start of fall to now could be lengthened. By the fall equinox, in my area of the Northeast, the worst heat and humidity of summer have abated, so it’s comfortable for one of my favorite activities, walking.

It all changes when the clocks are turned back an hour, as they were this weekend. From this point on, there are few hours to take advantage of the waning sunlight—a difficulty for those of us on a more-or-less 9-to-5 schedule.

It can be mid-afternoon, with the sun burning brightly, and before you know it it’s time to turn on the headlights as you follow the line of cars heading home—as happened to me yesterday, shortly after I snapped this picture of sunlight in Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

Photo of the Day: Fall Twilight

When I took this photo the other day looking out on the creek at Overpeck Park, a couple of miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, it seemed that I was not merely making a visual record of a typical twilight in autumn, but even a goodbye to the season this year.

Almanacs had predicted that sunset was still a way off, but you’d never know it from the headlights on in cars negotiating their way under uncertain gray skies. There's so much darkness in the atmosphere in the attached image that I feel like I could be looking at a J.M.W. Turner landscape painting.

Temperatures haven’t been regularly frigid this year, as they had in past late Novembers. In fact, periodic upswings in the mercury have been enough to bring people out in sizable amounts, if not the droves of spring and summer.

But on a day like the one this weekend, it depressed the spirits to have sunset slip away, even if only until tomorrow. A walk is an activity that anyone can relish, no matter your job status or income level. To have a contracted afternoon felt in keeping with a year in which so much we once took for granted could no longer be enjoyed.

Photo of the Day: Sunset, Overpeck Creek, Bergen County NJ

These days, with the hours of daylight dwindling—and the cold of late fall held haphazardly at bay—I take every opportunity to walk, including in Overpeck County Park, a few miles from where I live in Northern New Jersey.

I was especially anxious to get my walking in earlier this week, before the onset of three days of rain, in whole or in part. This sunset on the adjoining Overpeck Creek, a tributary of the Hackensack River, filled me with such a sense of longing for what I knew was about to pass that I took this photo to memorialize the moment.

Quote of the Day (Muriel Spark, on a Most Unusual Sunset)

“There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on everyday life.”—Scottish novelist Muriel Spark (1918-2006), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

The centennial of her birth has come and gone, but I couldn’t let 2018 depart without a post about Muriel Spark. She wrote much throughout her career, but—at least partly due to the 1969 film starring Maggie Smith (pictured here)—The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is her most famous.

The quote you see here gives a marvelous impression of her style, but what it cannot do is give a sufficient idea of the treasures of the novel—very much including its unreliable narrator. For anyone considering education as a profession, it offers a morally stringent view of how teachers can form—and, as in this work, deform—the young. And it demonstrates convincingly that, no matter how the merits of a film (or, in this case, a play, too), a novel has pleasures unrivaled by visual media.

Photo of the Day: Lincoln Center at Sunset, NYC

I’m still trying to get around the idea of sunsets around 5 pm. But the whole thing gets to be somewhat more bearable when I can emerge from a performance of My Fair Lady, as I did this afternoon, to find this image of Lincoln Center. (That’s the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace in the foreground.)

Photo of the Day: Red Sunset, Overpeck Park Extension, NJ

This is another photograph I took this past weekend at the Overpeck Park Extension, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

Photo of the Day: MY Kind of Twilight

Enough of “Teenage Paranormal Romance” (possibly the worst category name and use of shelf space I’ve ever come across in a bookstore), and all other baleful manifestations of Stephenie Meyer. I snapped this beautiful sunset on Saturday night, nearly 24 hours before the New York area began to experience sleet, etc. I was viewing Overpeck Creek from the banks of the Overpeck Park Extension, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

Photo of the Day: Sunset, Overpeck County Park

This was one of those scenes that, when you immediately glimpse it, you simply have to whip out the camera and snap away. I took this late this afternoon at the Overpeck County Park extension, only a couple of miles from me in Bergen County, NJ.