What I Learned From A Lost Day About Continuity
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Your birthday might be a historical fiction. Find out about the days deleted from the calendar, and the creative power of succeeding your own story. Welcome to What I Learned From… "Each day has a color, a smell." ― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices What I Learned From …When I started researching this week's essay, I had bad news for my 74-year-old father: "Dad, I hate to break it to you, but your October 14th birthday isn't real." He was, understandably, a bit confused (and also concerned what the heck I was talking about.) But historically, if we jet back to October 1582, there was no October 14th. There was no October 9th. There was no October 5th. People went to bed on Thursday, October 4th…and woke up on Friday, October 15th. Here we find 10 whole days that weren't lost, they were "unwritten." So how do we agree that something that undeniably happened should no longer be counted in our shared humanity? There were 10 sunrises and sunsets after October 4th, they just weren't October 5th-14th. But we have to jet back even further to when this story begins. Before 45 BCE, people had a rough idea of days and months and years. They just didn't need to know them exactly. What did it matter to an agricultural society if it was Monday or Thursday? Crops need tending every single day. Someone had a problem with this structure, though. See Julius Caesar really wanted to expand the Roman Empire. He had a way of always wanting to do that. And there was a lot of unrest on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, etc.) with the sons of his rival Pompey managing the Republican forces. There was another structural problem: In Rome, Caesar couldn't appoint new senators (who would allow Caesar to build a military offense and go to war for the territory) until the first of the year. Which was months away. So Caesar met with Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, who educated him on the Egyptian solar calendar, and they came up with the Julian calendar. A system that divided the year into the 365.25 days it takes Earth to orbit the sun, with leap years every four years. The Julian calendar was good, and kept things together well enough for the next one-and-a-half millennia. But there was a huge problem: it actually takes Earth 365.2422 days to orbit the sun. In reality, they were off by about 11 minutes and 14 seconds a year. No biggie! Until you realize that time compounds. 11 minutes one year, turns into 22 minutes the next year, turns into 33 minutes the third year, etc. Enter the next Roman Empire…the Holy Roman Empire. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII learned that the calendar days had shifted so far away from the natural passage of time that *gasp* Easter was no longer being celebrated at the right time, the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon. It was time to adopt a new calendar, that was pretty much exactly the Julian calendar. Except it would better align with the pre-365.25 calculations. Which meant it needed to take those 11 minutes and 14 seconds, compounded into account. And leap years now happen every 4 years, unless the year is divisible by 100, in which case it is not a leap year…unless that year is also divisible by 400, in which case it is a leap year. I don't know why they swallowed a fly, perhaps they'll die! And that's how we lost 10 days in 1582. To realign the story with the solar system, Greg had to break the story itself. Well, for the Catholic-aligned countries and regions. For the rest of the world…it took time. Parts of Poland waited until 1584, and their neighbor Prussia didn't make the move until 1610. For 26 years someone in Poland could stumble out of the public house, across the international line, and catapult "back in time." England, and the commonwealth territories of the British Empire (Protestants notoriously at odds with the Holy Roman Empire) didn't get around to it until 1752, by which point another 200 years meant another day lost. No one was happy when they went to bed on Saturday, September 2nd and woke up on Sunday, September 14th. Imagine being charged a full 30 days of rent for 20 days of living! This global argument wasn't about Easter. It was ships, trains, and banking. To trade, communicate, and be governed in a globalizing world run by European empires, you needed to be on their clock. Adoption wasn't about accuracy or even convenience…it was colonial imposition. Asian countries didn't come around until the late 1800s and many Middle Eastern and Slavic European countries held out until the early 1900s. Heck, Saudi Arabia just adopted it in 2016, so they could trade on the planet's technological clock. Other ways of marking time were sidelined as "folk" or "religious" calendars, still observed but not official, and the Gregorian calendar became "reality." Maybe you've run into something like this with a piece you've been working on? A story that made sense once upon a time. When the information you had supported the narrative you wrote, in the moment. And it all worked…until it didn't. As you wrote, you accumulated pages. They compounded on each other. You start to feel the drift. The voice, the plot, the premise — they separate, then rip themselves apart, from the truth you're discovering on the page. Do you force the work to obey the old, flawed story? Or do you rewrite it to the story you now know is true? You have to do what Greggie did: you calendrically massacre the details. You have to "delete days", not because they didn't happen, but because their inclusion now makes the larger narrative untrue. You cut chapters, change voices, and collapse timelines. You accept the break in continuity as the price of alignment. We live in the Gregorian world. It's the story we've inherited. As a writer, you can't control the flow of ideas anymore than a 16th century farmer could control the edicts of a papal powerhouse. But you can control your own canon. When the story you're telling has irrevocably drifted from the truth you're discovering, you have the authority to do what the calendar keepers did: Not to mourn the lost days, but to institute a new continuity. (Unless it's family…sorry about your birthday, Dad!) Freshly Forged …What's new, what's coming, and how to be part of it. The Forge at CYC is cooling through January, while I bring together everything that's been taking shape in my solo-flame time. I'll share updates as soon as things are ready to strike! Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. "I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room." — May Sarton Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week's essay. Use it to write your own. You're explaining your life to a stranger and skip over a whole chunk. "Oh, that year doesn't really count." You're not erasing it, you just don't include it anymore. What would you choose? Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life's too chaotic for bland words. Succedaneum [suhk-see-DAY-nee-uhm] (n.) — A substitute for something no longer suitable. From Latin succēdāneum ("that which comes after or steps in") it names a functional replacement for a system that has outgrown its use. Not an upgrade or perfected version...it's a necessary stand-in. Useful for describing a successor that breaks continuity for the sake of coherence. Sorta synonyms: proxy, makeshift, stand-in Use it for: the app that replaces your favorite discontinued one, that plot you graft onto a dead-end draft, the Gregorian calendar Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week's newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Starting Monday, January 19th, Buffer is running the seventh edition of their Creator Camp: a free 30-day challenge to help you post on social media more consistently with daily prompts, habit tracking, and community support in Discord. I'll be there, and you can sign up here. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Nah, I'm gonna need the full-throttle sugar version to get me through these dark winter days. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - This newsletter runs on curiosity, not ads. If you know someone who loves strange history, good sentences, and/or thinking sideways…consider forwarding this one to them. It helps more than you know, and it costs exactly zero dollars. |