Chasing after Time

With the start of the new year I've been reflecting on the passage of time. Over the Christmas break I was at an independent bookstore and one of the things that stood out was an old clock.

Clocks taught us that a healthy resting heartbeat is sixty beats per minute, or one beat per second. In Europe a clock is in the center of every town, or perhaps a town was built around every clock.

The expression 'once upon a time' first appeared in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century. It was during that period that time was first conceived of as an indefinite continuous duration – a progress of existence toward some future ‘ever after.’ To wrap our minds around that concept, we set out to measure it; and the first mechanical clocks were invented.

Once upon a time I stood still on a station platform. Around me, a newspaper boy chased after passers by.  A beggar, more languidly, did the same. Pigeons chased after bread crumbs, dropped by passengers as they chased after trains. Those in turn chased after the ticking needles of bold brass clocks.

Our societies were initially agricultural, so our clocks were first seasonal. As we urbanized, weeks, months, and years turned into hours, minutes, and seconds. A healthy resting heartbeat was still sixty beats per minute, but everything else in our lives sped up.

We had decided time was linear, and we soon discovered what that meant. Like a departing train, once gone time was irretrievable. Time was also indiscriminate of money, power, and influence: we were all allotted the same amount each day.

We moved from measuring time to chasing after it. But the more we picked up our pace, the further we lagged behind.  We were running out of time, so we tried to control it.

The railroad systems created the first standard time, and our governments ushered in times zones and the Greenwich prime meridian. A while later, daylight savings was conceived.

We controlled our measure of time, and confused it with time itself. We forgot that both it, and we, were finite.

Brian Selznick, author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, wrote, In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.

There is one place in the world where time will stop for you. Grand Central Station in New York City. Every day nine hundred commuter trains pull out of its forty-four platforms… one minute after their posted departure time. The phantom minute is a gift to passengers running late.

Umberto Eco wrote: You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn’t. Nature doesn’t; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps time never was about duration.

I wonder what we would do with time, if we only lived for a day.