Clock of ages
I met a friend yesterday, hadn't seen him in five years. A handful of emails in all that time. He hasn't changed a bit. I said, "You haven't changed a bit." He said, "Of course not."
Five years: many long hours, or five quick turns through four short seasons. I can barely recall who I was five years ago. I can hardly believe it's been more than a month since last I saw him.
So I'm wondering again at the instability of my sense of time. Someone recently told me he didn't believe in time. He expressed this in the course of denying fiction, because, he said, to write fiction is to chronicle fact, since the writer describes a corresponding action that likely occurs in the future. Make of the comments what you will. I heard in his words the warring specters of Newton and Einstein.
It has been asked before: what is the nature of our time, what do we know of ourselves by our relationship to it?
Consider the importance of the clock to our culture. In the religious Islamic world, the muezzin divides the day at five points according to physical phenomena. What can we say about the west in relation to other cultures by reference to its units of time?
Can the secular west be defined by its devotion to the division of each day into twenty-four hours, into fourteen-hundred-forty minutes? Are we able to return to a day organized by events discernible with the senses -- sunrise, sundown, high noon -- or, conversely, are we approaching something new, something still more radical? In the authority of the clock, do we have, among other possibilities, an expression of man's ingenuity and will triumphant, or an example of man's folly?
If, before going to sleep, I am sufficiently conscious of a time at which I must wake up, I can do so, without an alarm, to within minutes of that time. I believe this to be a common ability. So I wonder whether our units of clocktime actually find correspondence with the rhythms of our bodies. Alternatively, perhaps the sleeping mind superimposes natural sleep cycles against the hours assigned to the night. Or have we internalized an abstract fabrication to a remarkably intimate degree?
Of course, at two in the morning, once again, maybe I'm just a little tired.
Five years: many long hours, or five quick turns through four short seasons. I can barely recall who I was five years ago. I can hardly believe it's been more than a month since last I saw him.
So I'm wondering again at the instability of my sense of time. Someone recently told me he didn't believe in time. He expressed this in the course of denying fiction, because, he said, to write fiction is to chronicle fact, since the writer describes a corresponding action that likely occurs in the future. Make of the comments what you will. I heard in his words the warring specters of Newton and Einstein.
It has been asked before: what is the nature of our time, what do we know of ourselves by our relationship to it?
Consider the importance of the clock to our culture. In the religious Islamic world, the muezzin divides the day at five points according to physical phenomena. What can we say about the west in relation to other cultures by reference to its units of time?
Can the secular west be defined by its devotion to the division of each day into twenty-four hours, into fourteen-hundred-forty minutes? Are we able to return to a day organized by events discernible with the senses -- sunrise, sundown, high noon -- or, conversely, are we approaching something new, something still more radical? In the authority of the clock, do we have, among other possibilities, an expression of man's ingenuity and will triumphant, or an example of man's folly?
If, before going to sleep, I am sufficiently conscious of a time at which I must wake up, I can do so, without an alarm, to within minutes of that time. I believe this to be a common ability. So I wonder whether our units of clocktime actually find correspondence with the rhythms of our bodies. Alternatively, perhaps the sleeping mind superimposes natural sleep cycles against the hours assigned to the night. Or have we internalized an abstract fabrication to a remarkably intimate degree?
Of course, at two in the morning, once again, maybe I'm just a little tired.
posted by General Bird at 00:24
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