To everything there is a season. There is a time to campaign and, thank goodness, a time to cease campaigning.

Maybe you noticed it when you went out for the paper yesterday morning: a peculiar stillness, a momentary return to sanity. Up and down the street, the yard signs still announced their allegiances, but they no longer seemed to shout. It was if they knew their days — no, their hours — were numbered. The campaign had wound down to its last day, its energy spent. The only tremors left would be aftershocks. The storm was over.

It would be a blessed 12 hours before the storm after the storm hit — the flood of election results, the victory speeches and concessions, the still undecided races hanging on contested ballots, the claiming credit and casting blame….

But for one precious day there was an almost holy peace, a truce in man’s never-ending race for power. It was a day to be seized, its rituals savored at polling places and while driving past intersections that had sprouted all these people waving different campaign signs and SMILING. But they would soon be gone, too.

There has always been something special about an American election day. One day the campaign is plowing ahead full speed, complete with brass bands, all stops pulled out, and the next you know, the whole thing is over. The fit has passed. Partisanship has been suspended, at least briefly. A strange, unaccustomed quiet descends. Great fun, elections, and greater relief when they’re done.

Which is the real America? The crossfire of raucous debate and dueling ads, the glittering grandiloquence of the candidates and their surrogates, all the razzmatazz and Moment of Decision oratory? Or the sacramental quiet of the voting booth, with its confessional air, where at last everything boils down to the single citizen alone at last.

A free election is both, of course, the melee and the pause, The People and the individual soul. The two merge during the campaign, then separate in the voting booth. That is what gives election day its Janus-like quality of looking both backward and forward, outward and inward.

The long, quiet day is a surreal, 12-hour pause between two political explosions — the long campaign and what everyone hopes won’t be the long count. Continued...