When fans' feet on the pavement quicken toward the gates, we cease to measure the length of the day with clocks, whose ticks and tocks now distend ever more noiselessly until we count beats and rhythms in pitches and swings. We frame periods in innings and recover a more intimate acquaintance with beginnings and endings, with the origin of finitude. This is the hour for hushed vitality, for precise attention, for active sensation—sight, sound, touch, but most of all smell and taste. This is the crimson hour.
Welcome to monsoon season in the nation's capital. For the last two weeks the mornings have dawned saturated, the afternoons have piqued brightly late, and the gloamings have expunged their languor onto our heads or hoisted scrimshields with pellets of distilled water.