One advantage the early riser has over his opposite number is that he is better placed to enjoy certain celestial and atmospheric phenomena. One morning the moonset over the hills behind my house was unusually entrancing. The moon was at its fullest and the sky at it clearest. The Morning Star, that overworked example of so many philosophy of language dissertations, was in the vicinity of the moon, at least phenomenologically. The conjunction put me in mind of the Turkish flag which depicts Venus and a crescent moon in similar proximity. It was on such a crescent-mooned night that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) began the Kurtulus Savasi (the War of Independence) that brought into being the Republic of Turkey. Or so I was once told by a Turkish girl.
And then a day or two later I was out hiking at first light. The trail took me down into a chilly streambed. Climbing out of the drainage was like walking into a warm house: the temperature differential was twenty degrees Fahrhenheit if it was two. It takes a hiker, one accompanied only by his shadow, to appreciate such phenomena properly. The trail runner and the mountain biker are working too hard and are too much claimed by the hazards under foot and wheel to attend to the subtle. And the hiker who brings company along will be snubbed by Nature who jealously hides her charms from the unworthy and the inattentive. Nature: "You bring society into my serene precincts? Then enjoy your society, you can't have me."
As for the windshield tourist -- he may as well be on another planet.
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