“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?”