Sunset Or Afternoon

"The Big Rain."

Hollister to Barbara:

"'I was just thinking of...shall we say us...rose-covered cottages, sunset of life. Darby and Joan stuff.'" (IV, p. 233)

With increased life expectancy, is retirement a sunset or a long afternoon? I feel that I am experiencing the latter.

Sunsets are evocative. Chapter 6 of The Time Machine is "THE SUNSET OF MANKIND." I have been seeking out similar remembered phrases but they are not always as remembered.

"The quietness of the last long Sunday fell over an entire region of space."

-Bob Shaw, Orbitsville (London, 1977), nineteen, p. 187.

I had thought that that was a long afternoon. Shaw used the same phrase in another novel and I got the impression that it was a quotation.

Googling discloses that an alternative title of Hothouse by Brian Aldiss was The Long Afternoon Of Earth.

Anderson, Wells, Shaw and Aldiss: let us enjoy our afternoons, Sundays and sunsets.