Temporal Interiors, a Topography
We can understand time as a series of statements about our affairs. Our interior lives clock better than the watches we make. The Brazilian may linger, may use his presence as a compliment, as Robert Levine would have it: “It is 12:30; class has been over for half an hour, yet here I stand, and we are speaking, you and I.”
A nervous New Yorker may glance at his watch not out of disrespect but from some slow interior meltdown, a neurosis in numbers on an imperturbable dial.
Or he might just want you to notice his timepiece.
Puritanism has its own dire results, its vestiges a steady and straitened rhythm on the town tower, whether Colonial brick and wrought iron or International steel and glass. It says “This much have you lived, and what have you done to show your membership in The Elect?” These days, that translates into mere doing well, rarely into doing good. Do-gooders need not schedule themselves tightly since justice is forever and now.
It’s telling that the new city hall in my town has no exterior clock: it’s a black glass tower. It says “We are the government, but you are on your own.” This structure owes nothing to the church, no single spire, no icon melted into Modernist abstraction. It is as matter-of-fact as the office blocks housing the administrators of industry, and like them it seeks its authority in opacity.
Watches, in particular, are about availability if not always about utility. A black-faced über-simplified Movado with just hands and a single jewel at 12 o’clock says that the user assumes too much–or is in a position to assume a great deal. It is a timepiece for the privileged poseur. All manner of prettification has befallen watches and thereby the reflection of time: a gold Rolex with complications might be paired with an Aston-Martin or a Jag, a Bentley instead of a Rolls. The Swiss Army “field” watches I cling to attempt to convey practicality but also quality, ruggedness, durability, a self-branding most ignore, so my watches communicate more to me than to anyone else, a reminder of some lowly but still quite impossible set of personal ideals and expectations.
Most people under 20 or 25 don’t bother with watches. They use their cellphones instead. This bespeaks not just a lack of internal regimentation (mom always made sure they made their soccer games on time) but also a lack of subordination, an entitlement: they’ve never been anywhere a cell phone was verboten. Relying on a cell phone clock assumes an available network, and this generation is nothing if not heavily networked. They assume networks function as a matter of right. It will be easier to deny this generation health care coverage than high-speed Internet. That the latest technology might be far from reliable has never occurred to them—that it might be unavailable is inconceivable. They are a social people in a way that mine—a batch of “latchkey kids—was not, and that their communication device would also be how they mark time says more about them than all the worried books the their Baby Boomer parents have written.
In the Western world, particularly in the US, it’s hard to find anyone whose life is time-free. Monks and nuns, such as we still have, live lives just as regimented as ours, or moreso. They’re on liturgical time, though, not on schedules set by self-appointed efficiency experts in HR. But I’d hardly call the schedule of a monk “God’s time,” as that seems to have been expressed through planetary motion and is marked by our fitful and sometimes unsuccessful adaptations to it. This time is perhaps most elusive of all, and astronomical and meteorological scholars aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone around you aware of the phase of the moon or the precise moment of dusk or dawn. The rise of watches and clocks knelled death to cultures revolving around agriculture, with its intense concern with seasonal changes and its own inland tide. The vestiges of fieldwork remain in the paltry 2 or 3 percent of us who still farm, but I have never met a farmer who didn’t wear a watch, showing that they, too, are more the slaves of the market than the soil. Only the most romantic among us still imagine a farmer who somehow senses the vagaries of wind, the value of a sunbeam more or less; the real ones have one ear open to the commodities futures on the radio with its inevitable readings of time at half-past and on the hour.
In most classrooms, the clock is on the same wall as the chalkboard, a horrible mistake from a pedagogical point of view. High and above the teacher’s shoulder, the clock dominates like a sort of temporary moon, and it steals spark from even the most thunderous of lessons. In the idealized world we try to solidify in the academy, it should only be the teacher who cares about time, not the students. And even then, the teacher should only care for the most practical of reasons. But this, too, is an indication of our state of affairs: the administration is responsible for where the facilities department puts the clock.
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