IVJOSHUA ADVISES DAYLIGHT SAVING
“How about an interview with one of the shades on daylight saving?” I suggested timidly, as the city editor was racking what he calls his brain in search of a suitable assignment.
“Right! Get hold of one of the old astronomers, Galileo, or Ike Newton, or—or—”
“How would Joshua do?”
“Joshua? You don’t mean Josh Whitcomb? He wasn’t a real character. He was only—”
“No, I mean the Biblical Joshua—fellow who made the sun stand still. That’s what our modern clock-fixers are trying to do. And as the pioneer, the original inventor of the scheme, a few views on his twentieth century imitators ought to be interesting.”
“Go to it. He can’t make the situation any more confusing than it is already.”
I found the ancient prophet reclining under his own vine and fig tree, studying a brightly colored seed catalogue. With alacrity he accepted my invitation to talk for publication.
“Daylight saving, eh?” he mused. “It’s odd how you moderns never seem to get any ideas of your own. Always the same old thing over again. There’s nothing new under the sun. And now you’re trying to beat old Tempus Fidgets with what you imagine is a brand new scheme, but really is older than Solomon’s mother-in-law. What do you expect to get out of it, anyway?”
I started to explain how getting up an hour earlier in the morning through putting the clocks ahead gave us an additional hour of daylight at the other end of the day, when the old prophet cut in: “Just fooling yourselves, eh, a great, big game of make-believe by grown-ups in order to have a little more time for play? You move the clock forward and pretend it’s an hour later, by general agreement? Well, why don’t you extend the idea while you’re about it and apply it to other things besides clocks and time?”
“What, for instance, Mr. Joshua?”
“Well, take the thermometer, an instrument that’s been invented since my time. When I lived on earth we never suffered much from either heat or cold, because we hadn’t any thermometers to tell us that we were uncomfortable. If it were one hundred and ten in the mighty scarce shade out on the desert, wedidn’t know it. Eighty-five or a hundred and fifteen—it was all the same to us. We never had any hot waves. There were no daily lists of heat victims. The thermometer liar was unknown. Nobody was initiated into the Ananias Club for boasting that the thermometer on his back porch hadn’t in fifteen years varied a degree from the official weatherman’s. We may have felt a little warmer under the mantle some days than others, but we couldn’t tell in degrees how uncomfortable we were, and so we were spared a lot of suffering. It’s the thermometer that makes you moderns take such a morbid interest in the weather. If you hadn’t any means of measuring the heat and the cold, why, you wouldn’t care anything about them. I was a prophet, but I never went so far as to dare to prophesy the weather. I knew my limitations. But your government guessers, backed up by their thermometers, seem willing to take any chances. Now, I suppose it’s too much to expect you to abolish your worrisome thermometers entirely, but why not take a hint from your daylight saving business and tinkering with the clock twice a year, and do a little fixing of your thermometers?
“For example? Well, for a beginning you would have to adopt a new kind of thermometer with changeable or removable figures. On Aprilfirst of each year let everybody mark his thermometer down ten degrees. That is to say, the present figure ninety would be replaced by eighty, and eighty by seventy, and so on. The first hot spell would prove the practicability of the device. The scheme is purely psychological, of course, but so is daylight saving. Under the old pessimistic thermometer, which has done so much to encourage the Society for the Promotion of Justifiable Profanity, the temperature, we will say, would be eighty-five degrees in the shade, provided you could find any. But according to the marked-down thermometer it would be only seventy-five, just warm enough to sit comfortably on the front porch and smoke your pipe and read the paper while your wife was washing the dishes in the kitchen. Then in mid-July along comes what, under the old arrangement, would have been a regular scorcher, with the mercury registering ninety-two and all the meteorological Munchausens in town down at the corner drugstore boasting that their pet instruments were registering one hundred and two plus, in the shade. But the optimistic thermometer, operating under the universal heat-saving law, would record only eighty-two degrees. And everybody would be comparatively cool and comfortable. In fact,you would practically never have it ninety degrees in your climate.
“Think what that would mean to perspiring humanity! For we all know how the thermometer affects our feelings. And the optimistic thermometer would work just as well in winter as in summer. It would only be necessary to mark it up ten extra degrees in October. Then you would have mighty few zero days. The saving in coal would be tremendous, for we all regulate the heating apparatus by the thermometer instead of the feelings. The optimistic thermometer in winter would register seventy degrees in the living room when the old-fashioned instrument would have made it only sixty. Isn’t that as sensible as daylight saving?”
“It is certainly a novel idea, Mr. Joshua,” I replied in a non-committal tone. “You seem to be carrying out to the logical extreme the Scriptural theory that as a man thinketh in his heart so is he. Do you know of any other practical application of the principle?”
“It is capable of indefinite extension,” responded the ancient prophet. “Take the matter of people’s ages. Lots of folks are so sensitive on the subject that it makes them unhappy and others are discriminated against in business or the professions because they happen to be a year or two past an arbitraryage limit and have a bit of gray in their hair. Now, why not by common agreement let everybody over the age of forty mark down his or her age ten years? We are all as old, not as we look or feel, but as we think we are. If we can say it is only five o’clock when it’s six, then we can assume we are only fifty years old when, according to the strict, literal calculation, we are really sixty. Let’s give psychology a chance.”
“Fine idea, Mr. Joshua. Make believe that it’s an hour later or earlier than it is, that it is ten degrees hotter or colder than it is, and that we are all ten years younger than the record says. We live largely in a world of self-delusion anyway. That is what makes living endurable. You would only carry the principle a little farther, if I understand you. But there’s one little device for human happiness I wish you would add to the others.”
“And that is?”
“A barometer that will always predict fair weather when I want to play golf Sunday morning and rain if my wife wants me to go to church.”
But from the look the prophet gave me I saw that Joshua couldn’t be joshed with impunity, and leaping into my astral airplane I glided back to good old terra firma.