It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late…Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
I like Longfellow’s poems a lot, but this line just strikes me as funny, I don’t know why.
(In his original draft, he’d written: It is too soon! Ah, nothing is too soon…if you can stay in bed ’til afternoon.)
There’s a wonderful photography blog here on WP (JaneLuriePhotography.com), which recently published a cool nighttime shot of a building with just one apartment lit up.
It reminded me, that I’d once taken a cellphone shot of an office building with the same situation, really late on a Sunday night. It just looked pretty lonely, almost kinda creepy.
And it’s hard not to wonder.
A copywriter, needing a brilliant pitch for a client by Monday morning? An accountant missing 17 cents on the International Grit & Abrasives Inc. account? A junior attorney, who realized a perfectly comprehensible paragraph somehow slipped into a rental lease agreement?
A crooked developer, scheming with Russian gangsters to fix an election?
An intern from the mailroom, running off some cryptocurrency on the company’s mainframe?
Or perhaps it was a photoblogger, who turned on the lights, and then looked down, took a picture of me, down on the street, looking up & snapping a picture of the only lighted office?
OK, I guess these are all pretty far-fetched.
Well, whatever, and whoever you are up there – – pack it in, go home, before we have to fetch a doctor.
CNN: “People who work an average of 11 or more hours per day have a 67 percent higher risk of suffering a heart attack or dying from heart disease than people who work a standard seven- to eight-hour day, according to a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Those who work between 10 and 11 hours per day have a 45 percent higher risk.”
UpState & Away - - - - Waterlooseneca.com 
Your description of a person looking down and taking a picture of you while you take a picture of him reminded me of the famous Escher piece in which two hands draw each other into existence:
https://arthive.com/escher/works/200361~Drawing_hands
Ha! 🙂 Yes. In that case, I’m glad he got the picture of me, so that I exist!
Ah, but if you’d been thinking, as Descartes noted in his famous realization, “Je pense donc je suis,” “I think therefore I am,” you’d already have known you exist. On the other hand—or on both of Escher’s hands—it can’t hurt to have someone up in a building reinforce your existence.
Awesome. 🙂
Awesome!
I enjoyed your riff on who was behind that single lighted window. Honestly? All of your suggestions seem plausible, but I wonder whether you might have left one out: the member of the janitorial night staff who decided to take a break, lean back in that leather chair, and prop his feet up on that big, polished desk, imagining what it would be like to have that view in the daytime.
That might be the most plausible one of all.
Let’s be generous and say maybe someone just forgot to turn the light out when they left. Sorry, rather a mundane suggestion.
Thanks Mick. Saving electricity is so ingrained, if I noticed that after I was on the bus, it would probably keep me up all night
Yes, I know what you mean.
Or… maybe someone’s on the loo… 😉
Ha! 🙂
Hi Robert, What a fabulous image with the one light theme. Beautifully shot – full of mystery and a story in the making. Thanks so much for the shout out– much appreciated. 🙂
Thank you, Jane, I am so glad you like that shot, makes my day. 🙂
What a fun post! It has me thinking now–about the Robert Plant song: “Your lights are on, but you’re not home. . .” Maybe that person simultaneously left the office building light on and the apartment/house lights on as well.
Yes! How did I forget that song. Thank you, Cecilia. If they were like me, they could’ve been at work and suddenly thought “I left the stove on!” and run home, and then at home “I left the office lights on and the door open!” and then realized the car was still running in the driveway, and maybe they were supposed to pick somebody up on the way home.
The room probably was vacant. They forgot to turn off the lights!
You mean…the worker was kidnapped? Shanghaied??! Oh heck I should have grabbed a heater and busted in to check.
(Most likely you’re right, Neil, just trying to imagine a scrap of excitement in a pretty mundane event 😬 )
The statistics you cite at the end here are pretty remarkable. Of course we can delve far deeper into the inferences of the studies and data until we’re blue in the face but putting that rigor aside for the moment what you’ve brought forth here calls to mind the increasing quite well-documented evidence workers of all stripes in the U.S. are working more and more and taking less time off. And when they take time off they’re bringing work with them. A very untidy complicated public health problem, it seems? Enjoyed your lighthearted yarns here, though lol Thanks again for your kind words the other day, Robert. Somehow I trashed my reply to them. Hope you’re having a good week so far and dodging raindrops instead of snowflakes.
I think one of the peaves of my last boss was my lack of enthusiasm for overtime. Of course, when you have a mentally focused job just because you leave the office doesn’t mean your brain turns off. Does that count as work hours?
For what it’s worth, I just discovered JaneLuriePhotography.com a couple days ago, she is quite good.
I seem to have become a West Coast/Gulf Coast Photo Groupie.
I know what you mean about taking work home in your head, I sometimes have a committee debating stuff upstairs, and when I tell them I need the room, for a vote on what to make for dinner, etc. they just hang out in the hallway talking loudly.
What always used to bug me was that loud party they always seemed to be having next to the bedroom when I was trying to get some shuteye.
🙂
Being familiar with Jane’s blog, and remembering that great photo of hers, it’s fun to see this tie-in. Your photo is wonderful too, with a different sort of mood to it. And your musings are not so far-fetched at all, these days. I’d like to think the light’s on up there because some non-human kinds of beings, maybe cats or mice or dragonflies, are partying up there….
You know, now that I think back, it was blinking, maybe lightning bugs.
It’s a rare day that I work more than seven hours. When I do I feel it for a few days after but then I am becoming a codger.
This a very interesting picture for all the possibilities you mention as well as its graphic qualities.
Thanks, Steve. Hard to see something like that solitary light, without imagining a few stories.
Love your photo too, Robert!