THE TWILIGHT CONSPIRACY: Why the Clocks Must Never Go Back Again
By Camden Preedy, Founder of the Dawn Liberation Front, a Movement for the Preservation of Human Dawn.
Let us say it plainly: the turning back of clocks each autumn — this barbaric, bureaucratic ritual, this calendrical vandalism — is an act of civilisational sabotage. It is an offence against light, against life, against the fragile spiritual economy of modern existence. When we submit, meekly, to this twice-yearly horological mutiny — “spring forward, fall back,” as if recited by sheep — we enact not a practical adjustment but a small, genteel apocalypse.
I am here not merely to complain but to declare war. The clocks must never go back again.
The Tyranny of Dusk
What is this nonsense of “saving daylight” as though photons were a commodity, to be banked and withdrawn like some celestial currency? Daylight cannot be saved. It is spent the instant it appears — in golden beams across breakfast tables, in glimmers on the edge of the commuter’s coffee, in the pale, defiant light that insists that life, despite everything, continues.
And yet, every October, the state — that most officious of timekeepers — having stolen an hour of our evening hands it back as if doing us a favour. We are told it’s for our safety, our productivity, our circadian health. Lies. Lies all. The true purpose is control. It is the domestication of time itself — a bureaucrat’s fantasy of power over the heavens.
Consider Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, or Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. These are paintings not of time’s measurement but of time’s feeling — the shimmer of temporality as lived experience. Imagine if Turner had to paint under fluorescent lamplight at 4:30 p.m. because the government had decreed the night shall begin early. What then of art? Of hope? Of sanity?
Philosophers Against the Clock
Kant, that punctual Prussian, thought the moral law within and the starry heavens above were twin proofs of reason’s order. But he never had to attend a 5 p.m. meeting in pitch darkness. Heidegger, meanwhile, spoke of being-toward-death — but I suspect even he might have reconsidered his ontology had he faced the annual descent into artificial gloom engineered by some parliamentary committee in 1916.
And Nietzsche? Oh, Nietzsche would have howled. He who said “Become who you are” would surely add: “And keep your damn clocks where they are!” The eternal recurrence was meant to be metaphysical, not meteorological.
The Psychological Wreckage
Every year, millions plunge into what psychologists euphemistically call “seasonal affective disorder.” Let’s call it what it is: state-induced melancholy. When the clocks fall back, so do we — into lethargy, into despair, into the psychic equivalent of damp socks.
What is this but an act of sanctioned cruelty? The body expects dusk at six, and instead receives it at five. Our inner chronometers rebel, our serotonin dwindles, and we become pale shadows of our summer selves. Even the houseplants, those stoic companions, seem to slump in protest.
A Modest Proposal (That Should Be Taken Very Seriously)
I hereby launch The Dawn Liberation Front — a grassroots movement to Abolish the Fall-Back Forever.
No more tampering with the sun. No more calendar tyranny. Let us reclaim the light that is rightfully ours, let us wrench our wrists free from the manacles of mechanical deceit.
We shall wear tiny lapel ribbons as a symbol of resistance. We shall host candlelit vigils (ironically, yes, but passionately) on the night the clocks would have changed. We shall write to our MPs, our HR departments, our vicars; whoever must be told.
Let the message be clear and thunderous:
“We will not fall back. We will only rise.”
A Final Plea
Time, as Augustine knew, is a mystery. But it is our mystery, not one to be meddled with by ministers. When we move the clock hands backward, we enact a kind of spiritual regression — a symbolic retreat from the horizon of possibility.
Enough. Let the clock stand firm in its honest ticking. Let evening arrive when it must, not when the state decrees.
So join me, brothers and sisters. Join The Dawn Liberation Front. Together, we shall keep the light alive.
Because to turn back the clock is not simply to adjust an hour — it is to betray the day itself.
