“While the Earth Remaineth…

…day and night shall not cease.” So spoke Yahweh in the book of Genesis 8:22, feeling a bit remorseful for having flooded the Earth. He’s not going to barge in interrupting the natural cycles of growth and withering, of the seasons and days, from now on.(.although He will someday just set a match to the whole stinky planet, but that’s in the sweet bye and bye). For the nonce, we can depend on the natural cycles, the rhythm of the seasons and the days.

yeah?
Dont t count on it.

See, now: day and night, light and darkness, are racist.

And apparently nobody was a bigger offender than Shakespeare. There’s now a move in London to “decolonize the Globe”(Theater). References to darkness and light are everywhere in his works. And clearly it refers to skin color, not, as we might logically suppose, to the universal planetary phenomena of, Y’know, sunrise and sunset.

Here’s ONE clearly offensive passage, Romeo’s soliloquy when he sets eyes on Juliet. ( I used the very first line on the birth announcement of my daughter, and it is still so true!):

“O she doth teach the torches to burn bright! /It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night/Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear:/Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear!/ As snowy dove trooping ‘mongst sooty crows/So this fair lady ‘mongst her fellows shows!”,

He’s describing the coup de foudre, the lightning bolt, love at first sight. It is so bright, so illuminating, that you feel you’ve been walking in a semi twilight until the love object blazed upon your vision.

It won’t be only Shakespeare, of course. There’s the KJV (in which supposedly he was complicit). “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light”, says Isaiah.
Yeah. And now they wanna turn it off.

And what about Tolkien? Of course he has already been attacked, but: the central metaphor of LOTR is Mordor, the Land of Darkness where the shadows lie, vs the luminous world of the elves and the lesser, quotidian, homely light of the Shire. The “home fires”.

Maybe night and day themselves hafta go. Why not? Bill Gates thinks he can hide the Earth from the face of the sun.

Now, our dear Saint, Sir Simon: this is what I mean by no longer being able to “negotiate” the world. How can I speak or write at all, ever again, if I can’t even refer to day and night?

As the Psalmist lamented, “Who can tell how oft he offendeth?”