Driving north the other day the weather was quintessential winter, especially in the quality of the light—photographers probably have a name for it; I don’t know. But it was a sunless, total kind of light that seemed to swell and peak just before dusk, that midwinter, midafternoon fade that I’ve decided is more depressing than actual nighttime darkness—Emily and I were discussing this recently, that perhaps the most intense disthymia or skewed circadian rhythms of real or imagined S.A.D. are exacerbated not by the solid, complete darkness of nighttime itself but instead this very pre-dusk, incipient darkness; a milky, solid, cold light that heralds nightfall (with whose darkness it’s easier for us to reckon because that’s year-round, that’s normal, but this is something else, something rarer and therefore less welcome [and what must it be like in Greenland or Scandanavia, where the sun's angle of incidence is such that this terrible limbo state lasts days, weeks, months at a time?])—the perfect accompaniment to a vast sadness initiating in the accreted losses and gains of the past but also bound up in the present, and maybe/probably even the future in terms of its unpredictability: the stealthy way it grabbed me from behind when I was listening to certain songs or looking at a particular stretch of highway between here and Iowa. It’s a deeply authentic but also vague, indefinable kind of sadness we all have to know sometime and so with which we may as well get acquainted—but without, god forbid, becoming too familiar.