Chicken Soup for the Asshole

“It’s darkest just before the dawn”

Fortune-cookie philosophers and badly written pop-songs aside, this tired cliché has caught my ear too many times to ignore. Let’s break it (and them) down.

1. A terrestrial observer views the maximum solar brightness when the sun’s rays have the most direct trajectory; overhead, at its zenith.
2. The opposite of the observer’s position is called the antipode, a diametric transversal of the Earth. For most Americans, this would be somewhere in the southern portion of the Indian Ocean. 
3. From the point of view of the observer, the sun is at its nadir (directly “below”). This is the least direct path from the sun to the observer.
4. All points before and after provide more light than at the nadir.

The Earth’s orbit and rotation admittedly affect what time this occurs, but it is always the point that is furthest between sunrise and sunset; the elliptical middle. Not just before the dawn. I realize that this goes against the blind optimism of the learnedly helpless, who believe that “…whenever you feel you’re at the darkest moment of your life, remember sunrise is just a moment away!” but in reality, you’ve got at least 6 more hours of soul crushing agony and despair.

Now, were these pretentious poets to replace ‘darkest’ with, say, ‘most dangerous’, and then only apply the saying to descriptions of the Battle of Helm’s Deep-- I’d have no problems. In that case, yes, dawn did signify a drastic improvement in the situation. Any other usage is just a sad testament to delusion and self-denial.