Break(ing) Time

In just a few days, we will all participate in a required behavior that calls into doubt all of our strongly-held beliefs about time. We will set the clocks forward just one hour, contributing to near universal temporal dysphoria which will last until just before it is time to adjust them back again, in the Fall. Although I have no real preference except that the government keeps its hands off our clocks, I dread the time changes mainly because of what it reveals: time is a ruse.

There have been a lot of bills introduced to stop yearly time changes. Actually there has been one bill introduced over and over by the same person. This somewhat oafish Florida representative hit on a rare insight when he suggested that the double clock changes each year limited daylight in a way that prevented the vacationers that fill his state’s coffers from enjoying the hot and balmy weather, there. The latest iteration of the so-called “Sunshine Protection Act'' has stalled yet again, however. Because Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a federal law, individual states are prohibited from adopting their own time, which makes for some unhappy constituents. However, a stalled bill at the federal level implies that no end to DST will be forthcoming. Standard time, which is what we are enjoying now, will revert to whatever it is when the sun rises at 5 and sets at 9 in mid June.

The great sci-fi author Douglas Adams once said “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.” I have always heartily agreed with Adams and so did Kant. According to the dour German idealist philosopher, time is a construct that we apply to the world in order to understand the tiny changes that occur at any given (ahem!) time. Our brains see the world in a very specific way. In order for our perceptive mechanism to parse reality into digestible bits, we developed the ability to understand that time passes and the world we see shifts as it does. Little did we know that the construct of time would become a debilitating chain around our ankles fostering a rise in the deep and unhealthy addiction to measuring and keeping track of what “time” it happens to be. Kant is not rolling in his grave. This great thinker apparently had a severe daily schedule which he followed to the second thanks to several clocks around his rooms.

We have become thralls to time in a way that marks us not as prime cousins of our great ape relatives (who don't need clocks) but as groveling supplicants to circular lords whose faces convey magical measurements and dictate our days. We may feel this gives us mastery over time, but the reverse is actually true.

It's not hard to look back to when our ancestors first began to show promise in rising from their grassland bowers to start using tools and giving names to one another and note that primordial man did not have a wristwatch on. For thousands of years we marched along with the natural clockworks provided to us by the sun, the moon, the tides, the stars and our internal biological imperatives. Humans are by and large diurnal creatures, functioning in the daylight, so we instinctively know when the sun is up and we tire and retire when the day is waning. There is no doubt that for a very long period in our fraught and stressful first millennia, humans were fairly good at knowing what part of the day they were in without needing a watch or clock. They were probably happier.

One of those ancestors had a brain wave as he watched a full moon rising over the veldt on the way back from a hunt and decided to count how many “brights” came and went before the moon was full again. This was probably the same titan of thought who decided that a small L-shaped cluster of stars “looked like a bull”. The counting of days slowly merged into a sectioning and sub-sectioning of the duration of days and nights. A likely scion of the family who created the genius above made notches on a tree as the sun's light rose or sank, and divided those final numbers into evenly counted bits. Soon enough he would have discovered that the sun's light moved both laterally, diagonally, cast shadows around standing rocks or trees at different parts of a day and shed light later and later or earlier and earlier. At some point after that, a willing convert to the blossoming time religion went a mile down the path and did the same thing on another tree. Thus horology was born. Soon enough, they would discover many other phenomena of the apparent passage of time and the many changes each day could show on the face of the planet.

Though these two stellar members of our race could have no idea, their observations and curiosity were the first steps toward the tyranny of ‘Big Chrono’. Today, we all mark each minute, each second, each hour, each day like good supplicants. Most of us, if not all, have countless clocks all over our homes. Our communication devices, our devices, our ovens, microwaves, televisions, our computers and smartphones, all have clocks prominently displayed. We hang clocks on our walls despite this proliferation and wear clocks on our arms. 

Even before the spread of technology like personal computers and smartphones, clocks were everywhere. Our quaint downtown has a clock by the railroad tracks that splits east and west on the main drag. There used to be a big flashing clock made of light bulbs on the highest bank building in town that flashed between the time and the temperature. As if this wasn't enough, you could dial a specific telephone number for the time and temperature at any point in your day if so inclined. This was regardless of the fact that we have clocks built into our vehicle dashboards.  Before that, church bells would ring out the quarter hours, so that everyone within hearing distance could know what time it was. In the small town I grew up in, there were several churches that did this, providing little excuse for those of us who were out past when the street lights came on. In the town we live in now, the steam whistle used to mark the breaks for mill workers downtown would blow at seven, at noon and at five. The churches don’t ring their bells and the steam whistle is gone, but our dependence on clocks has become so ubiquitous that we don't even notice it anymore. 

Our insistence on knowing what time it is is based entirely upon an underpinning of time being important for every aspect of our lives. We have to do things and those things have specific start and end times. Doctor’s appointments, jury duty, and job schedules make it hard to argue that time is meaningless especially when I have to be at work promptly by 9. I could explain to my bosses that my circadian rhythms didn't wake me in time for the department meeting, but as covered by chronographs as my home, car and limbs are, I have no excuse. Even if I sleep through the alarm, it’s pretty hard to claim ignorance of the time. That doesn't stop people from being “late” to work or appointments, of course. In fact, there has been a rash of people disregarding time, but that’s a topic for another essay.

The gods of time have, like their religious counterparts, undergone a rather significant growth in power and with such expansions come schisms. Early chronography was primitive at best. At a recent work outing, the presenter remarked that we should take a moment to admire the seventy year-old sundial adorning a dias in the midst of their arboretum. She then quipped dryly that they are often asked by visitors if it still works, to gales of derisive laughter from the audience of mostly librarians. Not being able to read or understand a sundial is one thing. Not being able to tell time is another.

Horology, the study and measurement of time, has undergone several changes, the most recent of which was the move from analog to digital clock. The analog style (round or square face  encompassing twelve numbers with hands swinging around a central pivot indicating hour and minute) has gone out of style, at least for younger generations. The digital clock, where the hour is represented by the leftmost number and the minutes by the right numbers past a colon are easier to read and understand. The analog clocks in our library's central pillar have always been incomprehensible to anyone younger than twenty. I know full-grown adults who still cannot read an analog clock.

My own denomination is military time which indicates numbers not usually associated with run-of-the-mill time tellers. Most analog and digital clocks begin their first half of the day with 12 and begin again when the clock hands cycle the face and twelve noon is indicated. Not so my old Timex Army Recon watch. Beneath each hour number was another number, from thirteen to twenty-three, so that instead of using 12 as the final hour of the day, you began at zero at midnight and then preceded from twelve to thirteen, the hour after noon and so on to fourteen and onward until zero again showing the full 24 hours in one day. Devotees of this style of time-telling are usually active duty military or veterans, nurses, EMS and me and my brother. 

Aside from being infuriating for regular folks, this slightly more logical application of numbers to time is nearly completely feigned. I don't care what time it is. I have long ago given up worrying about the day or the hour. Lost in the woods without a watch and my smartphone battery having died, one day will soon blend into another until indistinguishable. My body's internal clock may help me to figure out when to sleep or when to rise, when to eat or evacuate my bowels, but the need to know every minute of every day will slip quietly into blank obscurity. Since I do not intend to get lost in the woods any time soon, though, the despotic rule of the time-centric life will continue.

My only challenge as we proceed to spring the clocks ahead one hour will be to make sure that—like my father before me—each damned clock in our house has the exact same time, so that I don't time travel between rooms, like crossing the international dateline backwards. Until the double time change is finally expelled from our nation’s time-centered culture, we will have look forward with dread as the days get longer in the evening, and anything like a regular relationship with time continues to evade us.