Last
week I told the story about the Reader’s
Digest editions I received, a present sent by
Nathércio França. I told of the
long wait I had for them to arrive and of the
pure joy I felt at finally having them in my
anxious hands, and the pleasure I still have
in reading them. Today, I continue to take advantage
of them, at the moment I am browsing through
some from November 1945, researching information
which would be helpful in my essay about the
calendar. A little history and a proposal of
change, to help our lives become a little more
orderly in terms of weeks and months. Don’t
be alarmed; my friend…at the present moment,
no known government is concerned about these
things. All are much more involved about how
much money they owe and to whom they owe it,
and also about rising taxes and tax evasion.
The
name calendar comes from the latin “calendas”,
which represented the first day of each month
in ancient Rome. There have been countless ways
of measuring time through history, each nation
having their own method of organizing the weeks,
months and years. And so…pre-history calendars
began to appear. The Hebrew, Chinese, Mayan,
Armenian, Egyptian, Hindu, Moslem, Roman, Aztec
and, who knows, perhaps even a Brazilian calendar,
back when our native Indian population, the
Tupi-Guanany nation, measured the passing of
time by counting the phases of the moon. It
was always such an absurd mixture of criteria,
calculated in such a way, that an airplane which
left London on the 5 of January, 1939 and arrived
in Belgrade, in Yugoslavia on the same day but
on a date designated as of December 23, 1933.
If an airplane flies very quickly and arrives
in Japan in only 5 hours, it would end up arriving
yesterday! It’s so crazy that no one can
understand it. For example, Easter can fall
on any Sunday from March 22 and April 25, and
Christmas always falls on the same day, December
25. Take note that Holy Friday is always on
a Friday but never on the same day of the month.
Mathematicians, in doing their calculations,
see that there are no three trimesters of exactly
the same number of days. They always have 90,
91, 92 or 93 days. This is because 30 days have
September, April, June and November. February
has 28, and all the rest have 31. In this poetic
manner, it’s very confusing to calculate
mediums and make statistics. The Orthodox Jews,
even until today, use the lunar calendar and
synchronize their seasons, injecting an extra
month every two or three years in passing. The
first Romans lived under a year of only ten
months, or, if you please, 304 days. This continued
until Numa Pompilio, in the seventh century
B.C., added the months of January and February.
But, all this made dates so uncertain that the
high priests resorted to habitually cutting
them down time-wise when their adversaries were
in power and would then stretch them out to
please their favorites… The Egyptians,
on studying the shadows cast by the pyramids,
created the year of 365 days and eight hours,
having twelve months of thirty days each and
five extra days reserved for celebrations, and
besides all this, they even had a leap-year
every five years. On the other hand, the Aztecs
had a year consisting of eighteen months and
twenty days, and the remaining days reserved
for festive days or for bad days which they
referred to as “nefastos”.
In
an attempt to uniform time, the system was then
adapted to the Roman world, when Julio Cesar
decreed that the year 46 B.C. be stretched to
445 days, so that it would be synchronized to
the sun. Due to the numerous superstitions regarding
odd numbered days, the five extra days saved
for celebrations were promptly distributed among
the months. One day was subtracted from “Februarius”
and given to “Quintilis”, which
later was renamed “Julius”, in honor
of himself, creator of this calendar. Cutting
the year down further yet, a second amputation
was perpetrated against “Februarius”,
for Augusto, who summed this day to his birth
month, August. It was only in the year 325 A.C.
that the council of Nicea established the week
consisting of seven days, independent of the
number of months and years, strong enough to
walk on its own legs, if a week could have legs,
of course. It was in 1852 that Pope Gregorio
corrected Cesar’s astronomy, ordering
that three leap-year days be stricken from the
calendar every four centuries. And here is a
novelty, if a world year calendar was developed,
each one would be doted with thirteen months,
each week starting on Sunday and ending every
Saturday. The 365th day would be extra and be
called the last day of the year. That would
then be a great disadvantage for us Brazilians:
Christmas and New Years would always fall on
the week-end. We would lose our much cherished
extended holidays.
