Between Boxing Day and New Year's Day. The only time of the year (over two years, actually) when Time takes a vacation. The day's a blink -- and it's night again. At 4:30pm.
Mood is Time's stand-in, and it plays its own tricks, ultimately (a finite concept, ultimately) discarding Time altogether, or leaving us asking how it could've gone so fast, or so slow. Point is it behaves differently -- during this time.
Clock-time has a finite history and you can time yourself to see how long it takes you to hunt it down online, until you're satisfied you know enough about it, or are freaked out by it -- enough that you've had enough of Time.
Every year between Boxing Day and New Year's Day I program a film festival for one that goes by no name other than the films I assemble from my collection. On one of these days -- what I think of as the festival's "creation day" -- are the three films made by David Lean between 1962-1970. They are Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr Zhivago (1965) and Ryan's Daughter (1970).
The people to which these film titles refer are a sado-masochistic homosexual British Army officer, a polyamorous Russian doctor-poet and a spoiled Irish teenager who seduces and marries her former school teacher, only to fall for the leader of her country's occupying forces. All three films largely take place during the First World War (1914-1918). Lawrence and Zhivago are epics, Ryan's a pastoral.
Like acts in an opera, these films form a master narrative that I continue to struggle with. And I enjoy the struggle. Especially on those darkest days of the years.
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