Nightingale

– It seems to have gone very dark.
– That'll be the clocks. They went back yesterday.
– Even so, it should only be as dark as it would have been an hour later. Or do I mean earlier? Whatever it is, it shouldn't come as such a shock to the system. You feel as if you have been plunged into the middle of winter. With nothing to look forward to, but ever-shortening days and ever-worsening weather. Where are the songs of summer?
– Or possibly of spring, to quote Keats.
– If you say so. I am trying to express something on a grand and universal scale, without being fettered by unnecessary details.
– Or facts.
– Keats did not constrain his poetic muse by worrying over facts.
– "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
– My point exactly.
– I am sure Keats will be reassured that you are both of the same opinion.
– Only because we have shared an experience common to all men.
– Such as bemoaning the weather?
– I mean, to be dragged down by the cares and frustrations of the world.
– "Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
     And leaden-eyed despairs."
– Precisely. That's what I was trying to get at.
– Does this traumatic experience happen every time the clocks go back?
– It's not much better in the spring: then I worry about losing an hour of my life.