Four in the Afternoon

Four in the afternoon is the most honest hour. Not because it has more truth than the others — the morning has its own truth, and three in the morning has more of it than anyone wants — but because at four the day has stopped pretending to be about anything. The people who finish at four are walking out into it; the people who finish at six are not yet thinking about home. The light has done most of what the light intended to do. Nothing is being asked of anyone, which is, I think, the prerequisite for noticing things.

I notice it most in rooms I have just walked into. A friend's living room I have not seen since winter, a hotel lobby in a city where I have nothing to do for an hour, the corner of a bookshop where I am not particularly looking for anything. The light comes in flat from the west, lands on the back of a sofa, and the sofa is honest about itself. Whatever color it actually is, it is that color. Whatever age it has reached, it is that age. The morning lies about furniture; the morning is a flatterer, bleaching everything new. The evening lies the other way, dimming and forgiving. At four in the afternoon a sofa is just a sofa, and the room around it agrees to be a room.

I have spent more time in those rooms than I expected to spend in my life. The hour is the hour I am most often by myself, and that is not an accident — I have engineered it without meaning to. Lunches end by then; the meetings I take are usually done; the people who want my afternoons want them earlier or later. So I read at four, or I walk, or I sit somewhere with a coffee that has gone cool and decline to apologize to anyone for it.

There is a particular kind of attention that becomes available only at this hour. It is not the bright attention of morning — pointed, anxious to get something done — and it is not the soft attention of evening, which is already half a memory by the time you have it. It is something flatter, slower, with no agenda; you can look at a thing at four in the afternoon and not need it to mean anything, and the thing can just be a thing, and the light can just be the light.

I am suspicious of men who do not have an hour they belong to. I have known a few, and they are restless in a way that does not heal; they treat every hour as a negotiation, and they lose, and the losing makes them louder. The hour you belong to does not have to be four — I have a friend who belongs to six in the morning the way a monk belongs to a monastery, and another who has chosen, somehow, eleven at night. The choice does not matter. The having of one does.

What I think I am really writing about, here, is that I have a place to put myself down. The hour is the place; the light at four is the door of the place, and the room behind the door is mine. I have been letting myself in for years.

She has been there once or twice, although she did not know it was a room — she was reading, the light on her hands, and I did not say anything because the hour did the work.