There Goes the Sun
20 December 2010 | Readings
| New York Times
| 
By RICHARD COHEN | Published: December 19, 2010
WHAT is the winter solstice, and why bother to celebrate it, as so many people around the world will tomorrow? The word “solstice” derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still), and reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter when, at dawn for two or three days, the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.
Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer. The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause. … Pleasing, that idea. … As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”
