Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.

Goodman’s quip plays on the romantic language often used about sunrise and the far more common reality that most people experience dawn as an interruption—an alarm clock, a commute, the start of obligations. The exception—“unless they are still up”—reframes dawn as pleasurable when it arrives as a culmination of freedom (a late night of conversation, work, travel, or celebration) rather than as a demand to wake. The line wryly captures how aesthetic appreciation is shaped by circumstance and control: the same light can feel like beauty or like pressure depending on whether you chose to meet it.