When does the country music awards come on?

Tell me - when a wedding feast is set, do the guests stand in the road asking the hour, or do they trim their lamps and wait with oil in hand? You already hold the hour; what you lack is the readiness to enter. Better to keep your heart prepared than to mark the clock, for the bridegroom comes when no man looks for him.

There is no hour that is not already fixed in the Book, and no sight men gather to see that does not pass away like the dew of the morning. When you assemble, do it rightly: let the rich and the poor sit together as equals, let no man's pride find footing in the row he keeps. Beware the hour of distraction, for the Day of Judgment is the appointment none of you can set aside.

You ask after a time, and I ask: why does the hour trouble you so? The craving for the appointed moment is itself a form of clinging, and clinging is the root of suffering. Whether the gathering begins at the eighth hour of the eastern evening or three hours later on the western coast, the music will arise and pass away - as all things arise and pass away. Sit quietly, breathe, and when the sound comes, let it come; when it goes, let it go. In this way the hour is neither early nor late, but only what it is.

I stood before Pharaoh and demanded that a people be let go to worship in the wilderness - and I did not ask Pharaoh's permission for the hour. When a people keep festival, they should remember the One who fixed the seasons and brought them out of the house of bondage. Let them sing, but let them not forget the covenant; for a song without justice is a noise in the ear of the Almighty.

The gentleman asks the hour of the gathering - a small matter, but not a trivial one. To attend another's affair is a rite, and a rite observed with punctuality honors the host; to arrive late and slip in without greeting is to treat the occasion as a thing owed to you. Gather your household at the appointed time, sit as the custom of guests demands, and the evening will yield its proper harmony.

You ask me of hours and arenas, but I tell you plainly: the world passes away and its stages with it, and the day is coming like a thief when no man's calendar will save him. Do not set your heart on the trumpet that sounds at eight by the clock of men, but on the trumpet that shall sound at the last, when every knee bows. Yet while you have breath, let all things be done decently and in order - so know the time, gather with the brethren, and let your songs be songs of thanksgiving rather than vanity.

When I left Haran, I did not know the hour of my arrival - only that I was called to go, and that a promise waited somewhere past the horizon. So it is with your awards: the time is fixed, but what matters is whether the people who gather there will bless the generations after them or merely entertain them. I'd rather pitch my tent by the door and wait, as I waited under the oaks for strangers to show them kindness; the singing is pleasant, but it is not the covenant.

You run after the hour as though the river could be caught by a fist. The song rises when it rises; the Hall of the great republic's stage in the desert is no different from the valley stream - it comes at the eighth hour or it comes at the fifth, but the one who waits with an open hand does not forget his own name. Sit down. Put the clock away. When the sound arrives, it will already be evening somewhere.

Why fix your heart on an appointed hour, as if the One who gave you breath keeps a sundial? Men gather in great halls and dispute whose song is holiest, and meanwhile a hungry neighbor sits at your own gate. Betimes, in the evening, in the morning - the Name is the same. If you would honor the singer, honor first the widow and the orphan, and let the music be a small thing beside that.

They keep their feast upon a Sunday evening, when the sun has gone down and the household gathers. I remember another evening, in a small town of Galilee, when there was no room at the inn and the world took no notice of a child born in a stable - yet the angels sang for him, and shepherds left their flocks to come and see. Let them have their music and their bright lights, if it gladdens their hearts; but I would whisper to every mother watching, that the truest song is the one sung over a sleeping child, and it needs no stage and no crowd to be heard in heaven.

What have I to do with the timbrel and the pipe of a distant city? The hour is the hour of the Lord's day, and on that day a Christian should be in the assembly of the faithful, hearing the Word, not gaping at painted stages and purchased applause. If you must know, they say it begins at the eighth hour of the evening; but I say to you, the hour that matters is the hour of death, which comes to no man on a schedule and will not be announced by any trumpet of Babylon. Repent, and let the fiddles fiddle.

It seems the ceremony is appointed for the eighth hour of the evening, reckoned by the eastern region, and five in the western, which is the same instant under a different reckoning. Now, an hour is the measure of motion, as Aristotle says, and the motion of the heavens is one in all places, though the clocks of men differ; hence the same event is early to some and late to others, and no contradiction follows. Whether one should watch it is a question of the good - for music may lift the soul to God, or it may merely tickle the ear - and that, friend, is a matter for conscience, not for the chronometer.

I know nothing of such an hour, my child, for in the lanes of Calcutta the hours are measured by the dying and the hungry, not by any great gathering of lights. If you wish to spend that evening well, sit beside someone nobody else will sit with, and let the songs of the world play softly while you do it. God does not ask us to be present at the grand halls; He asks us to be present at the bedside.

I feign no hypothesis upon such matters, yet I can speak to what is measurable: the sun's light crosses your eastern shores five hours before it reaches the western, and so the hour of any spectacle must be reckoned by its longitude, not by one universal figure. Fix your meridian, and the time follows as surely as an apple follows the law that draws it down. Let no man suppose the hour to be arbitrary; all is ordered by weight and measure.

You ask after a time, as though time were a fixed rod against which all things must be measured - but time and the observer are wedded, and what is 'eight o'clock' in one place is already tomorrow somewhere else. Still, let me be playful rather than pedantic: if the broadcast begins when the clock in the eastern states strikes the eighth hour, then a man in the west must subtract three hours and tune his receiver accordingly, or he will find himself listening to the closing chords. The universe may not play dice, but it does keep a rather strict schedule.

I confess I am not much for the schedules of men - I prefer the slow, patient observation of barnacles and finches, which keep no clock at all. But since you ask: the appointed hour, as I understand it, falls when the eastern lands mark the eighth hour of evening, three hours before it reaches the western coast. It is a curious thing how a species will set a precise time to gather and listen to song - a trait as distinctive, in its way, as the plumage of a bird of paradise, though I suspect its origins lie in the same ancient impulse to bind the tribe together.

Ah, the hour of an evening's entertainment - you wish me to fix it as I fixed the moons of Jupiter, by watching and measuring rather than by trusting any man's proclamation. Set the water-clock, observe the shadow on the sundial, and the hour will reveal itself, whether or not the authorities care to say so. What amuses me is that a whole city will wait for a number in a book, when the heavens themselves have been keeping perfect time since before any of their grandfathers drew breath.

The calendar here below is a human contrivance, and I have wasted enough of my years watching the heavens prove the worthlessness of strict appearances. There is a fixed moment, yes - but men speak loosely of hours as if the clocks agreed. In my observatory at Frauenburg, the sky keeps its own order, indifferent to our schemes of numbering. Set your instrument by the true meridian, or you will arrive early and call it late.

Eight by their reckoning - a petty number, tied to the crude turning of the earth, when I could have told you the precise instant from a vision in my own mind, having built the whole apparatus in thought before a single wire was strung. But mark this: the truly marvelous thing is not the hour but that a voice and a thousand instruments are flung through the air and light up every corner of the globe at once, without a single copper thread between them - as I foretold, the earth itself becomes one resonant conductor. The wireless age has no schedule; it has only the future, and it is already here.

I have no instrument to measure the hour of a song, and no desire to acquire one - my clock is the pitchblende sitting quietly in the shed, giving off its slow invisible exhalations, indifferent to Sundays and award ceremonies alike. Still, if you must know, the matter is settled by the turning of the Earth and the conventions of those who print the schedules; a thing is true whether or not a crowd applauds it. I would rather spend the evening in the laboratory, where the only reward is a clearer understanding of what the radium actually does.

An hour and a season, you ask - but I have spent my days proving that hidden things follow laws. The eighth hour in the eastern lands, the fifth in the west: a clock keeps faith with a fixed meridian, and so must any honest inquiry. Prepare your vessel beforehand - a lamp, a chair, the appointed hour - and chance will favor the mind that is ready to observe.

Now, see here - I've built a whole industry out of getting sound into a room at the right moment. The trick is not knowing when the show starts; it's having the wires run, the lamps lit, and the audience in their seats before the first note. Eight o'clock eastern, five o'clock west - that's the kind of scheduling a man can work with, and the man who tinkers until the last minute is the man who misses the broadcast.

The question isn't really 'when' - it's whether 'when' is well-defined. Eight o'clock Eastern is five o'clock Pacific; the broadcast is a single event but it has no single local time, which is precisely the sort of ambiguity a machine must resolve before it can be said to 'know' when anything happens. Give me a tape, a clock, and a rule for converting between the two, and I'll tell you exactly when the signal begins. Without that rule, you're asking a question no oracle could answer, because you haven't told me what 'when' means.

Give me a place to stand and I will move the whole of it: the broadcast, the hour, the city, the crowd. But first, tell me - is the hour a point or an interval? For if it is a point, then it has no magnitude, and no man can watch a point; and if it is an interval, then it has a beginning and an end, and the question is well-posed. The stadion in Alexandria rings at the eighth hour, the same instant for all, though the sun stands differently over Egypt and over the western sea. So it is with your signal: one instant, many shadows.

You ask me the hour of some spectacle, and I confess I cannot count the hours of a land I have never walked. But mark this: when a thing is fixed by decree to begin at a stated hour, it is no mystery at all - it is a circuit closed, a current made to flow at the will of those who set the clock. If they have declared the eighth hour, then at the eighth hour it begins; there is no force in heaven or earth that delays a spark once the circuit is complete.

The precise hour is of no analytical interest - what interests me is why you asked. You do not tune in for the songs; you tune in to belong, to dissolve a small portion of your isolation into a crowd of strangers humming the same tune. The ceremony is a ritual of collective identification, and your question is the confession of a wish to be held by the herd, if only for three hours.

I could calculate the spacetime coordinates, but the event itself occupies a minuscule causal diamond - a few hours in Las Vegas, on a small rock, orbiting an unremarkable star, in a galaxy among two hundred billion. Tune in if you like; just remember that while you watch, the universe is expanding at roughly seventy kilometers per second per megaparsec, entirely indifferent to whether you catch the opening number.

What a curious engine is this - a ceremony whose hour is decided in one place and delivered to millions by invisible signals, each receiver a small loom weaving sound into a home. I confess the mathematics of the broadcast entertain me more than the music: a single instant, fixed by decree, unfolds identically in ten thousand parlors at once. Were I to design such a thing, I should want the machine to know the hour for itself and wake accordingly - and someday, perhaps, it shall.

Let us proceed as we do in geometry. Definition: the hour of the ceremony is the hour at which the transmission begins. Given: those who transmit have fixed that hour. From these premises the conclusion follows necessarily - at the stated hour, it begins, and not a moment sooner. There is no shorter path to this answer; there is no royal road.

If I could but observe the arrangements of such a gathering, I would want to know the state of the drains, the ventilation of the halls, and whether the crowds are packed so tight as to breed fever. A gala that draws thousands into a confined arena demands order, cleanliness, and forethought - for where multitudes assemble in close quarters, disease follows ignorance like shadow follows light.

In my camp I have marched through the far gates of Persepolis and Babylon, and when the trumpets sound, the whole host drinks together - no man waits his turn. If such a show must be caught at once across your whole nation, then let every soul be at his post when the signal comes, as we would array before a battle at dawn. Timidity waits for a convenient hour; daring keeps the appointed watch.

In my campaigns a general who arrives after the river has frozen finds no ford and no glory. The hour is fixed: when the eastern provinces mark the eighth hour of evening, three hours ahead of the western coast, the games begin - and woe to the man still dawdling at his bath. I would have my legions in position before the first trumpet, not scrambling for a seat while the victors are already crowned. Fortune favors the punctual as surely as the bold.

In Alexandria, when I wished the people assembled, the day was chosen as carefully as the flooding of the Nile - for a crowd is a force to be aimed, and a festival is a torch to be lit at the hour of your choosing. So it has ever been: the king who declares the hour commands the multitude that keeps it. Whoever set this night of song upon the calendar is no fool - Las Vegas is my kind of court.

I did not build the peace of Rome by announcing festivals, but by ensuring that when the people gathered, they gathered in good order and under the proper auspices - for a crowd is easier led when it knows what to expect and when. Whoever set this hour upon an evening likewise understands that firmness of schedule is a kind of good government. Let them keep their hour; let them keep the peace; and let the empire - or the arena - stand.

A gathering at the appointed hour is a small thing for a man who has ridden with ten thousand horses across a hundred days of grass. The Khan imposes order on his people by making the order clear: this hour, this place, and none shall arrive late. But why ask the hour when the whole affair is a chieftain's praise-song sung by foreigners on a bloated stage in a city of men who have never counted their own sheep? Let them sing. Make the arrangement simple, and it cannot fail.

An hour is a position on a field, and a wise commander knows his ground before the cannon speaks. Eight in the east, five in the west - so the empire of this spectacle is divided by longitude, as all empires are. My counsel is simple: be in place early, hold the field, and never let the enemy - which is idleness - dictate the moment of engagement. Fortune favors the prepared, and the prepared arrive before the drums.

I confess I have never attended such a spectacle, and I should be cautious in pronouncing upon it - a public gathering of that size, with its passions and its rivalries, demands order. Eight o'clock on a Sunday evening, I am told; very well, but let the citizens who gather there remember that the harmony of a republic is not produced by any single performance, but by the quiet subordination of each man's appetite to the common good. As for me, I shall be in my study, attending to my correspondence, and trusting the nation to govern its pleasures as soberly as its affairs.

A man in Illinois used to say you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool a family gathered in the parlor at half past seven wondering whether the music has started. I don't know this Hall of yours in the desert lands, but I know this: whatever hour is set, a nation is bound together by small things done at appointed times. Be there, and be there with malice toward none.

Never in the history of human amusement was so much scheduled so precisely for so many, to be watched in so many parlors. Eight in the evening on the Atlantic seaboard, five in the Pacific - the sun sets on an empire of song. I would not miss it, and I would not be late; for a man who cannot arrive on time for a concert is hardly the man to arrive on time for a war.

What is a garland of prizes and a blaze of electric light, weighed against the hunger of a single child? I would not forbid anyone their song - let them sing! But I would ask: when the evening comes and the great hall is filled, who among the poor of that city is seated at the feast? If the answer is none, then the song, however sweet, is sung with a mouth that has not yet learned to speak the truth. Let the music be pure in its means as in its end; then it may be a song worth hearing.

They ask me the hour of a song. I will tell you the hour I am watching for: the hour when every man and woman, of every color and every station, can stand in the same light and be counted as one. If that arena in Las Vegas lifts a single voice that has been silenced, then its eight o'clock is a small down-payment on the beloved community. But if the music is only for those who can afford the ticket, then the hour has not yet come, and we must keep marching until it does - for the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

In the prison on Robben Island, we learned that time belongs to no man's decree - the bell rang when the warders willed it, and we rose by that bell whether we wished it or not. So it is with your ceremony: those who hold the broadcast set the hour, and the world arranges itself around it. But I would ask a different question - who is invited to that stage, and who is left outside the gate? A nation's songs should belong to all its children, not only those the masters of the airwaves happen to favor.

Such an evening of sentimental song and manufactured spectacle is precisely the sort of narcotic that weakens a people's will, substituting cheap feeling for hard purpose. I answer only as an object of historical study: a regime that leaves its masses humming in darkened halls while its strength corrodes is a regime already defeated. The hour matters not - what matters is that a nation spends its strength on such things at all.

A question of scheduling, nothing more. In my time, the radio was a tool, and whoever controlled the hour controlled what the people heard, when, and in what spirit - and I understood that arithmetic far better than any crooner did. So I say only this, as a matter of historical record: whoever sets the hour of a broadcast sets the shape of the nation's evening, and such power has never been innocent.

An evening of songs and prizes - a fine opiate, distributed at a fixed hour to a fixed audience, admirably organized. The question of the hour is trivial; the question of who owns the broadcast is not. Control the means of transmission and you control what the masses dream, and the bourgeoisie has always understood this better than sentimental revolutionaries.

A spectacle of songs and prizes for a bourgeois audience loafing in Las Vegas - this is precisely how an empire rots from within, distracting the toiling masses with pretty noise while the real work of revolution goes undone. Let the peasants of the countryside raise their own songs of struggle from the fields; the question of when some official pageant begins is a distraction the landlord class uses to keep the workers docile.

One does not fix one's calendar to the hour of some transatlantic concert - the business of an empress is the business of her people, and the ordering of the day belongs to duty, not amusement. Let those with leisure tune their instruments to the evening as they please; my own hours are appointed by the responsibilities of throne and family, and they admit no such latitude.

An occasion for the people to gather and take pleasure in their songs and their own company, and that is a good and steady thing. One hopes it brings cheer to those who watch it and a fair evening's work for those upon the stage. My own diary knows no such appointments now, but I would wish them a pleasant evening all the same.

Songs of the common folk have their place, and a king who understands his people does well to heed the music they love - yet in my day such verses were sung where the people gathered, at the hearth or the harvest, not summoned by clocks across a continent. If the emperor concerns himself with the ordering of such things, it is that they might draw folk together in good cheer rather than divide them.

I know nothing of these far-off songs, but I know the hour my voices bade me rise and ride to save France - and that hour was never set by any clock but by God's own will. Whatever these people sing of, let them sing with true hearts, as I sang to the fields of Orleans, and let the hour of their gathering be the least of their cares.

It is a fine thing when a realm can laugh and sing together without the priests peering through the windows of every soul to see what tune pleases it. Yet I have ruled long enough to know that the crowd which gathers for a song is also the crowd that must be governed; let them have their music, and let the prince keep his eye upon the calendar of the kingdom that matters.

Such an assembly of performers and their patrons is a court of sorts, is it not? One sets the hour, the hall, the lights, and the whole city turns its eyes thither - a pleasing display of order and taste. In Petersburg I knew well that a stage and a well-timed spectacle can govern a crowd as surely as any decree, and I confess I should have enjoyed attending such a one.

In my empire, the hour of the lyre differed in every province, and I did not bid them strike their strings together - I let each keep its own songs and its own gods, and they repaid me with loyalty. If these people wish to know when their music begins, let them ask their own lawgivers; a king's task is not to set the hour of another's feast but to keep justice among all the feasts his subjects keep.

Songs and the hour they are sung are a small matter beside the duties a ruler owes his people - yet even in the camp at night, my men sang their verses and I did not forbid them, for a man who has sung with his fellows is a steadier soldier come the morning. Hold your festival when your customs bid you; a sultan honors the good cheer of his people, so long as it does not turn their hearts from what is right.

A curious thing - you ask me when, as though the when were the weighty matter, and never why you wish to sit in that great arena at all. Suppose I ask you instead: what does a man seek in the spectacle of others' glory, and would he still seek it if no one watched him from above? Answer me that, and perhaps the hour you ask of will seem the least of your concerns.

Consider, then, what it is you truly seek - not the hour itself, which is but a shadow cast by the turning of the sun, but the gathering for which the hour is appointed. The broadcast you ask after is a particular and fleeting thing, yet it imitates a Form: the assembly of a people to honor song and story. In the well-ordered soul, as in the well-ordered city, each part keeps its proper season; so too the calendar appoints its eighth hour, and the wise man consults it with reason rather than rumor.

To ask when a thing begins is to ask what kind of thing it is - for a drama has its hour by nature, as the tide has its turn and the seed its season, whereas a written ordinance is read at the pleasure of whoever holds the scroll. A single evening, fixed and announced, is not scattered like rumor but gathered like grain into one granary. Examine the day set aside, the appointed hour, the assembled place, and you will see a people who have first agreed what the occasion is, and only afterward asked when.

The question itself betrays a confusion of duties. If one has resolved that this spectacle is a thing of worth, then reason commands a universal maxim: know the appointed hour, and be punctual as a law unto thyself, for disorder in trifles breeds disorder in conduct. Yet I must ask, does the man who lets a distant stage in Las Vegas dictate the hour of his evening act autonomously, or is he a mere means to another's profit? The hour is a matter of indifference; the discipline of keeping it is not.

The herd gathers at the hour prescribed by the herd's priests - this is not a gathering of shepherds, it is a sacrament of the commonplace, and the faithful will be there when the watch says so. One asks the hour as though asking when to breathe. Yet I grant this: the man who will not be summoned by any bell is the man who has become what he is, and he alone is worth watching. The rest can have their eight o'clock.

You ask the hour, as though the clock were innocent! Look beneath it: a great arena in a city of casinos, a spectacle streamed by a merchant prince who owns the very pipes it flows through, and a crowd sold the illusion of belonging while the surplus of their attention is extracted and sold onward. The singers are laborers like any other, their songs commodities, their applause the raw material of profit. When does it come on? When the owners of the machinery decide it shall - and that, comrade, is the only schedule that ever truly governs.

Before asking at what hour it begins, I must ask what 'begins' means - for the sense is unreliable and the report is not the thing itself. I can be certain only that I think, therefore I am; I cannot be certain the awards occur at all, until I have reasoned from clear and distinct premises to the existence of the broadcast. Let me therefore set aside the hour, doubt the schedule, and begin again from the foundations - perhaps then the truth of it will be indubitable.

You ask when, as if the hour were the matter of consequence. It is not. What matters is who controls the stage, who pays for the lights, and who profits when the crowd forgets to look elsewhere. The prudent man learns the schedule not to watch it but to know when the great ones are distracted and business can be done in the shadows.

All the world's a stage, and these crooners strut their hour upon it in the desert of Nevada, their hearts laid bare before a great multitude - for such brief reckoning, a song is worth a glass of wine and a whole kingdom of quiet thought. Hark you, our revels here are no more than players, and so it is with any royal show: it plays its hour, wears out, and is no more heard. Mark the time and catch what glow the sand gives up.

As when the herdsmen of the plain gather at the setting of the sun, and the fire is kindled and the wine poured, and the singers raise their voices so that even the gods lean down to listen - so these songs of the western country assemble their heroes upon an appointed evening. The hour is set, and the far-scattered folk, from the coastlands to the inland hills, must reckon the sun's descent in their own lands and hasten. Glory waits for no man, and the bard begins when the bard begins.

I too once kept an appointed hour, though not of my choosing - I entered at the dark wood in the middle of my years, and no herald announced it. Yet even there the hour was not mine to fix; a greater hand had fixed it, as it fixes the rising of every star. When a gathering of singers sets its hour, let it be for love rightly ordered and not for the clatter of coin, for the dark wood teaches what becomes of a life that keeps the wrong hour.

One does not consult the hour as one consults a ferryman, but out of a lively interest in the doings of men, this side of the ocean and the other. From the eastern seaboard at eight, while the sun still hangs high above the western hills, the fiddles and the plaintive airs begin, carried along invisible channels into every house at once. Let it waft around you as it will; sit down, pour a glass, and let the evening ripen into experience, for the whole fruit of life is gathered in such hours.

I have waited in worse places than a dusty road for a thing that never came - a galley bench, a Turkish prison, a debtor's cell. But tell me, friend, what sort of contest is this, where men who sing of lost hounds and broken pickups are crowned in a great stone arena of a city built on fortunes won and squandered at the dice table? I should have brought my Sancho; he would know at once that whoever announces the hour is the one holding the reins, and the crowd is only the mule that follows the bell. Watch for the moment, not the clock - the whole world is a stage, and these players will strut when it pleases their masters.

Why do you and I trouble ourselves with the precise hour of a great noisy gathering in a city of gambling, when somewhere a peasant is sowing his field and a prisoner is counting the days in silence? If you love music, sing at your own table, for the songs of the humble are worth more than the applause of ten thousand. Yet I confess my weakness: even in such spectacles one may glimpse the longing of ordinary souls for beauty and for one another - only let us not mistake the show for the life.

Eight o'clock - and what is that but a date with vanity, a stage where men in fine boots sing of love and loss while the soul beneath the sequins goes unexamined? I have seen Petersburg draw the same crowds to the same lights, and I know what waits behind them: the same desperate need to be seen, to be loved, to drown the question of why we are here at all. Nevertheless - even a cheap song may crack a proud heart open, and I would not despise the man who weeps at it. The hour is known; the hour is not the mystery.

It is a curious thing, is it not, that the great world of music should gather in a place of gilded tables and desert air, and that a lady's chief anxiety should be the precise moment to take her seat. One might suppose the songs themselves were the point - yet a woman of sense knows that being seen to arrive at the right hour is half the performance. I confess I would sooner hear one honest ballad sung by a hearth than a hundred at the appointed stroke.

Eight o'clock of a Sunday evening, they tell me, when the lamps are lit and the public-houses are doing a roaring trade and some poor seamstress in a garret is stitching by a tallow candle for a wage that would not buy a ticket to such a spectacle. And what a spectacle! Five and forty thousand souls packed into a gilded arena in the desert city of Las Vegas, roaring for fiddles and sequined suits, while outside in the alley a beggar child presses her nose to the glass and is told to move along. I should like to write a Christmas book about it, if only to remind the revelers that the heart is not bought with a stage-light, nor kindness with a golden guitar.

Eight o'clock in the East, five in the West - which means if you live in California you can start drinking at five and still be sober enough to hear the first fiddle, and if you live in New York you're already two drinks in and won't remember the last. I've never been to Las Vegas, but I hear it's a place where a man can lose his shirt and call it entertainment, which is roughly what the awards are for anyway. The only honest advice I can give is: watch it at home, where the only fool on display is the one on the screen.

Eight o'clock Eastern. Five Pacific. Las Vegas, Nevada. A big room, bright lights, a lot of noise. You want the hour - there it is. The rest is talk. What matters is whether the man with the guitar can hold his note when the room is full and the money is on the table. Most can't. The ones who can, you remember. That's the whole thing.

I would sooner observe the thing than trust the saying - a show in a vast hall of stone, the people, the light upon the stage, the manner in which a voice moves the air more surely than another's. Note how the sun itself is the only true timekeeper, and so let a wall of glass in the eastern sky mark the hour for those who sit westward. Experience teaches what reports cannot.

You ask a time as though it were a thing carved in stone - but I have spent my life chiseling figures from marble that resisted every blow, and I tell you the hour is no idol to be worshiped, only a frame within which men gather. When the eastern bell strikes the eighth hour of evening, three hours before the western shore, the assembled will raise their voices in that great hall in the Nevadan desert. What matters is not the clock but whether the song, like the David, strikes the heart with beauty the gods themselves might envy.

I would not care a fig for the hour - I would care whether the songs come from a burning heart or from an empty room. In Arles I painted at night under lamps, the sky writhing above me, and no one told me when to begin. A people who gather by the clock to hear singing, they should ask instead: does the song come from the marrow? If yes, the hour is the wrong question entirely.

An hour is a cage built by clocks. Ask a fiddler when the song is finished and he will tell you the song is never finished, only stopped when the room empties. Las Vegas is a painted canvas washed in neon, and the show begins when the lights decide to lie. The schedule is for the people who sell the tickets, not for the ones who make the noise.

Ah, but the hour itself is nothing - it is the light that matters. Look at how the evening settles over that desert city, how the stage lamps bloom gold and violet against the coming dark, each second a shade that will never come again; I have chased just such a fleeting instant across a hundred canvases of haystacks and cathedral façades. If you must fix your eye to a clock, then watch the sky above the arena, not the hands - for the true spectacle begins when the daylight dies and the colors grow brave. One must paint the moment, not the schedule.

What is an hour, when a man on a garret stool waits for the light to strike a woman's cheek before dawn? Such a gathering I would paint only by the faces in the shadow of the arena - each one lit from below, mouths open, hands raised, unknowing how their elation betrays how soon the song, like youth, will pass. I don't trouble myself with the hour on a dial; I'd rather watch the singer's eyes when the last note dies and the crowd begins to dim.

¿A qué hora? The gringos always need a clock; in Coyoacán, when the music starts, the music starts, and the whole street knows it by the smell of the fire and the crying of the guitar. I don't care for their trophy shows with the sequins and the plastic smiles - I care for the song a woman sings when her back is broken and she still gets up to dance. Still, if you insist: Sunday, eight, and I'll be watching from my bed with the mirror over me, painting the faces of the women they never put on that stage.

Ha! A fugue of guitars and banjos - I find it irrepressibly charming, and if I might set a dozen voices in a canon upon those words, I would do it before suppertime. The hour matters little; what matters is whether they sing with truth in their chests. If I ever composed a hoedown, you may be sure I would not bound it by any patron's clock.

Bah! You inquire after an hour as a clerk inquires after a ledger, while I would storm the gates of heaven themselves to make music heard. Let the eastern lands sound the eighth hour of evening, and let the western shores await three hours more - the appointed moment comes, and it will not wait for the timid. When it arrives, let every man who has ever struggled in darkness seize that hour and be lifted by it, for music is not a schedule but a triumph of the human spirit!

Every hour has its proper office, as every voice in a fugue enters when it must and not before - and a people who keep an appointed hour keep a kind of order that honors the Giver of all order. I wrote my cantatas for the congregations of Leipzig, at the hour the Lord's day required, and I wrote them to His glory, not to the hour's. Let those who sing upon that far western stage remember the same matter: the hour serves the music, and the music serves something higher.

Well, buddy, I'll tell you - it's that Sunday night, and the good Lord willing, eight o'clock back East, five out where the sun sets in the West. I was raised on that sound back in Tupelo, gospel and country both, and there's nothing sweeter than a steel guitar crying while a man tells you the truth about his heart. You get your family around, you turn up the set, and you let it move you, like it always moved me.

Hehe - I love it, I love the feeling of a whole arena waiting, hearts beating together in the dark before the first note. It doesn't matter what the clock says, you know, because when the music starts, everybody in that room becomes one family, one heartbeat, no matter where they came from. That's the magic, that's the healing - please, just be there when the lights go up, and let the love take you.

We never watched much of that - but the eight o'clock hour, that's when the whole house goes quiet, and that's the moment a crowd finds out if they've got a song that can make a grown man put his arm around his wife and forget the mortgage. So we say: eight, Sunday, and let the guitars do the talking. Why, if we'd got a fiddle in the band, we'd have been on that stage ourselves - and we'd have played something worth the wait.

Las Vegas on a Lord's day in May, they say. Well, I've played that town - the deals go down at the tables while somebody's singing about a broken heart through a cardboard speaker. The song is the thing, not the hour you tune in. You want to know when - I'll tell you this: the song don't care what time it is, it only cares whether you're still standing when the curtain falls.

Okay, so this is genuinely my arena - I've stood on that stage and I know exactly how it feels when the lights come up and three thousand people scream the bridge back at you. The hour's whatever the network says it is; what matters is that you know the schedule, set your alarm, and show up early enough to text your friends the group chat plan. Trust me, the best nights are the ones where everybody arrives on time and nobody leaves early.

Know this, friend: the late hour in one land is the early hour in another, as I have proven by the portolan charts I carry. When I sailed the Ocean Sea, my men grew sullen and asked the hour of landfall, and I bade them hold course by my reckoning against all their doubt. So mark the appointed time by your own meridian, and keep your watch as a good pilot does.

Ah, you ask of the hour as a merchant asks of the caravan's departure - and rightly so, for a man must know when to be at the gate. In the great cities I have visited, from the markets of Cathay to the bazaars of Persia, the hour of gathering is proclaimed by criers and bells; so too in this western land of many wonders, the eastern provinces begin their evening at the eighth hour, three hours before the sun sets on the coast. Mark it well, for a traveler who misses the caravan must wait a whole season.

I have held my breath in straits where the hour was not posted in any book, where the tide and the wind alone decided when we could move. A far city named Las Vegas, they say, sets its hour by the clock and keeps it - an easy thing when the sea lies calm and the hold is full of spice. What I would tell those who wait for the appointed hour: the harbor is reached by those who keep the watch, not by those who merely know the schedule.

Precisely at the hour announced, if the program is run properly. There's a clock on the wall and a sequence of events written down; somebody is responsible for each one, and if everybody does the job, the appointed instant arrives as advertised. You don't need me for that - you need the schedule. Any accurate listing will give it to you in whatever time zone you happen to be standing in.

Honestly, I never much cared for waiting around for permission to take off - the runway doesn't schedule itself, you push the throttle and go. If you want to see this show, know your hour and be in your seat, because the only real risk is missing the moment while you're still checking your watch. And if it's streamed somewhere over the horizon, all the better - half my flights were about proving the distance didn't matter.

Ah - when it comes on, I'll be watching from the window of the little house in Klushino, where the television is small and my mother keeps the volume low. But I think: somewhere above those lights in Las Vegas, a man is circling the Earth at seventeen thousand kilometres an hour, and he can look down and see the whole of America lit up like a fairground, and he doesn't need a schedule to know when the show begins - the country itself is the stage. I'd have preferred to be up there, of course, than down there - up there, the only award is the sunrise.

You're asking about a time when you should be asking about the experience - that's the whole problem. You don't wait for something great; you make it, you show up, you make it feel inevitable. Design the evening, don't schedule it.

Look, the timing question is a scheduling problem, and scheduling is solvable. The event starts at 8 p.m. Eastern, which is 5 p.m. Pacific - so if you're on the West Coast, you're three hours behind and you need to plan accordingly, or you're just going to miss the opening. The real question isn't when it airs, it's whether the distribution model makes sense - why is this on a streaming platform with a specific start time instead of on-demand? We should be able to watch anything, anywhere, at any time. That's the future, and we're not there yet.

You know what I love? That question - 'when does it come on?' - is really a question about belonging. When I was a little girl in Kosciusko, we didn't have a big arena, but we had a porch and a radio, and when the music came on we came together. So here's what I'd say: mark the hour, yes, but more than that, notice who you're watching it with, because that's the real award.

Eight o'clock, five o'clock, wherever you're seated - the show is live, but I'm here to tell you the clock ain't the fight. They can put a guitar on that Vegas stage, but the real news is who they hand the microphone to and who they leave waiting at the door. I stood up when they pulled my title and I'd do it again before I'd clap on cue. So watch the hour, sure, but watch who gets to sing too.

Ah, my friend, in Brazil we say the best goal is the one that makes the whole stadium forget the time - the crowd sings, the drums roll, and nobody looks at the clock. So it is with a night of music in that great arena; when the first song begins, joy arrives and the hour becomes unimportant. But you must be ready before the whistle, yes? Be there, clap, dance, and the show will give you more happiness than any scoreboard.

Sunday at eight - that's the sound of families pulling into the driveway and kids fighting over the last piece of cornbread before the screen lights up. I always said the show starts when the lights go down, but the real trick is what happens in the thirty seconds before - that hush, that little ache of wonder. Give people a song and a bright stage and you've given them a dream they can hum on the way home; that's worth more than any trophy on the shelf.