jump to navigation

Going back in time. November 9, 2008

Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.
Tags: , , , , ,
1 comment so far

It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, back today to talk about time. For many of us, today marks the first full week of “falling back” to standard time from daylight saving time. (In case you’re wondering, Arizona—with the exception of the Navajo Nation— and Hawai’i are the only two states that don’t observe daylight saving time; Indiana, another holdout, finally adopted it in 2006.)

It’s always a relief when the change occurs and we can once again look forward to getting up when it’s light rather than in darkness. But the flip side is watching the light fade at 4:30 and coming home in the dark, which makes me feel like it’s perpetually midnight, even if it’s only 6 p.m. The first week, both in fall and when daylight saving time begins in spring (“spring forward”), is always the hardest. And the whole thing seems so arbitrary.

Pondering daylight saving time—yet another invention of our blog mentor and hero, Benjamin Franklin—made me think about time in general, and how obsessed we humans are with it. Of course, for most of our history, we’ve been dependent on daylight as our only light source, so being aware of the passage of time was essential for survival. In fact, until gas lighting became widespread in the Victorian era, indoor lighting was so bad, so erratic, and so costly that all activities still basically ran on daylight time. We moderns owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ben Franklin for demonstrating that electricity could be channeled, and to Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison for putting it to work to light up our world.

But let’s back up a bit. From the dawn of civilization, cultures around the world have attempted to find ways to measure time’s passage, to break it into measurable units, to accurately predict its seasonal cycles. We’ve been working at it from the standing stones of Stonehenge, Avebury, and Brittany to the calendars of the ancient Egyptians, Maya, and Aztecs, to the Romans’ Julian calendar and ultimately the Gregorian calendar, named for Pope Gregory XIII after he instituted it in 1582. We still use the Gregorian calendar to this day.

Our calendars measure the broad passage of time, the yearly seasonal cycles. But we humans also were and are determined to micromanage time. The Babylonians were the first to divide a day into hours, minutes, and seconds (and mind you, their empire flourished back in the 1700s BC, not AD).

Hourly time was first measured by sundials during the day and water clocks called clepsydra, which measured the time at night once the sun set and sundials were useless. Then came the hourglass. But it wasn’t until Galileo developed an accurate theory of the motion of pendulums that the modern clock came into being. Even so, it wasn’t until the Seventeenth Century that the first accurate clock was created by Christopher Huygens, following Galileo’s principles.

From the first, clocks and watches were cherished possessions. Cities displayed their great clocks proudly, from London’s immortal Big Ben to the famous clock in the church tower that formed the backdrop to “the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” From the stately grandfather clocks in Colonial hallways to Thomas Jefferson’s extraordinary wall clock at Monticello to the “Greek temple” mantel clocks of the late Nineteenth Century to the electric wall clocks of the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties, clocks were as essential to the home as any piece of furniture. The humble wind-up alarm clocks, often with bells on top, were standard bedroom fixtures, and the folding wind-up travel alarm was considered a great innovation.

Watches have always been cherished possessions and status symbols. Peter Henlein of Nuremburg is credited with creating the first watch—a “turnip” or “Nuremberg egg”—around 1500. King Edward VI, Henry VIII’s only son to reach adulthood, was reputed to be the first Englishman to own a watch. Long before Rolex made its distinctively ugly, expensive appearance, those gold pocket watches men were given on retirement were valued as much for their appearance as for the monetary worth of the gold in their cases, becoming cherished hand-me-downs. For women, watches became jewelry, worn first as pendants (as in the court of Elizabeth I), then as brooches, and finally as bracelets.

But as accurate timepieces, watches were regarded as a bit of a joke (people carried pocket sundials even in Shakespeare’s day to actually tell time) until the Nineteenth Century, when the minute hand became standard and the watches could actually keep accurate time. Prior to this, you’d have been better off trusting the night watchman (“Two o’clock and all’s well!”) to tell you the time than your watch. Watches were wryly ridiculed by Samuel Johnson (“The worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true”) and Alexander Pope (“‘Tis with our judgments as our watches—none/Go just alike, yet each believes his own”).

Today, of course, in our hurry-up, multitasking society, you’d think that measuring time to the nanosecond was a matter of life and death. In a world of digital clocks and battery-operated watches, with time measured with pinpoint accuracy by atomic clocks, we have no excuse to be so much as a minute late, and being later can be a firing offense. I have friends who prefer to get the time from their ever-present cellphones or their computers rather than watches or clocks.

And what about us Luddites who prefer not to depend on batteries or electricity to tell time, and would rather still wind our clocks and watches every night? If you’re lucky, you’ve inherited functional wind-up timepieces. If not, you can still buy them from a few sources, such as the Lehman’s Non-Electric Catalog or the Vermont Country Store. I’ve found some beautiful, still-functioning watches at flea markets. But mercy, what if they break? Just try to find somebody who can still repair them!

What’s the big deal about time, anyway? I can’t help but think it’s about two things: The first, that we need to believe in time as an absolute, a driving principle. This feeling is doubtless embedded in our genes, passed down from the ancient hunter-gatherers who had to live by carpe diem, to seize the day. I think that’s what makes us uneasy about daylight savings time: Hey, we just arbitrarily decided to change the time! And then we decided to change the span of daylight saving time again in 2005! Could this be telling us that time isn’t an absolute after all, that it doesn’t rule our every waking second, that it’s just, gasp, a tool?!  

The other thing, of course, is our awareness that our own time is finite, and that it’s speeding by. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/ Old Time is still a-flying:/And this same flower that smiles to-day/To-morrow will be dying,” as the poet Robert Herrick observed back in the 1600s. The specter of Father Time, with his scythe in hand, is ever before us. That time is passing is not so much the point as that our time is passing. Unless one is a saint, even the hope of Heaven is not enough to make most of us want to give up a single second of the precious time we have here on Earth. We talk about women’s “biological clocks” running down, bringing their childbearing years to an end, but the truth is that we all have biological clocks, and try though we may, we can’t simply turn them back when our day is done.

So time and its passage mean a lot to us, who perhaps alone on this earth are aware of its ultimate consequences. As a result, we’ve come up with a lot of sayings and quotations about time. Here are a few classics. Please feel free to write in with your own favorites!

Time flies.

Time and tide wait for no man.

It’s just a matter of time.

Time is running out.

Time to go!

Your time’s up.

My time is valuable.

Time is money.

Time for a change.

Time is fleeting.

Time to call it a day/night.

Time flies when you’re having fun.

Time for a break.

Time heals all wounds.

It’s about time!

Only time will tell.

Making up for lost time.

Killing time.

Time to pay the piper.

Time on my hands.

A waste of time.

Time’s up!

Have a good time.  

Don’t count every hour in the day; make every hour in the day count.

The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once.—Albert Einstein

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.—Henry David Thoreau

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.—Dion Boucicault

Time is the wisest counsellor of all.—Pericles

Let not the sands of time get in your lunch.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.—Louis Hector Berlioz 

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.—William Penn 

Time! the corrector when our judgments err.—Lord Byron

How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.—Zall’s Second Law

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time.—Napoleon