Even a Stopped Clock

 

November 7, 2022

 

Greetings from the arc,

 Yesterday I was awake before the sun arrived here, idly wondering about something beautiful, which while it may sound strange is not a bad way to wake up.  Downstairs I could hear the clock in the foyer.  It takes a breath, four times an hour, just before it chimes. 

 It is a Westminster chime.  I only know that from reading the clock face where it was printed in fine script, just below the arbor, the fitting for the key which I use to wind it.  I imagine it was put there so that people who make the clocks don’t have to answer the question on the phone.

 I wasn’t thinking any of that.  In fact, I wasn’t thinking about the clock, but it emerged into the mix with the little noise it makes as it takes a breath to say what is on its mind.

 It’s a beautiful clock, crafted by experts, and meticulously maintained.  It keeps excellent time. It was a gift from people who care for and respect me, chosen to last for decades, which it has, and it will.

 Its workings are a thing of complex beauty and mystery, at least to me.  Gears and wheels and pinions and springs, intricate and precise, unerring in their execution.  I have looked closely as these actors go about their work, and I know enough to not interfere with their intent.

 The clock introduced itself to the morning, a modest composition just before it presented the time to anyone who might be listening at that hour.  There is a slight pause, another breath if you will, and then the chimes.

 The clock chimed six times, soft and melodious, a gentle and lovely acknowledgment of the hour, produced from a mixture of science and art.  Six chimes.  And despite its intentions, despite its near-perfect design, and resulting truthfulness, it is wrong.

 Where my mind had been occupied with beauty, it was now tinged with sadness.  The darkness was unchanged, impervious to any opinion of the time.  I lay watching the motes in my eyes dance around in the blackness and felt pity for the clock in the foyer below.

 People we don’t know, for reasons we no longer comprehend, created a nearly arbitrary correction to one of the fundamentals of human experience.  There are casualties beyond those who are late, or groggy, or confused as a result of these twice-annual shenanigans. 

 I said to my wife recently that I have a love/hate relationship with the clock in the foyer.  On the one hand, I admire its beauty and its fundamental reliability, partnered with my regular winding.  On the other hand, it does not ever fail to announce the time to us, not in an obnoxious way, but still, it is inevitable.  I’ll confess this is mostly annoying when I am trying to take a nap, or to otherwise ignore the passage of time.  But the clock is not malicious, it is merely doing what it does well.

 And now it’s wrong.  There’s no fault to assign, it simply hasn’t kept up with changes around it.  We created the concept of time and then invented an instrument to measure it, and then scuttled the whole thing for reasons no one can rationalize today.  The clock in the foyer, and its less proud cousins, are innocent bystanders.

Imagine, being intelligent, thoughtful, reliable, accurate and creatively expressive.  And wrong. Wrong for reasons that are impossible to explain.  Someone simply rewrote reality, and now you are guilty of being wrong.  Until someone invents a different scenario, or you adjust, you are wrong. Well, not really wrong, but for the moment, not true. 

 In the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, we learned of the malleableness of truth, which regularly fell prey to whoever could rewrite reality, change history, impose whatever could be imagined over what actually was in fact. “Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia.”  As silly as you may find this comparison, in my mind, in those dim moments before the sun, it seemed a perfect fit.  It is not six o’clock.  It is five o’clock.  Oceania is at war with Eastasia.  Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

 In a way, I hate to change the clock.  It seems unfair to impose this strange wobbly reasoning upon a creation of such an exact purpose. 

 Somewhere I learned the pendulum clock was first designed by Galileo, which this morning I saw was nearly three hundred years before some other genius thought of Daylight Savings Time.  I feel ridiculous opening the glass door and inserting this frivolous nonsense into the mechanism that holds such dignified heritage, simply to adhere to an arcane societal notion.

 The pendulum swings softly in a regulated arc, releasing the tension placed in the springs by the energy of my turning the key in the arbor. There are minute movements within that guide the hands to their place on the face. Then, there is this breath, and tiny hammers create music with the chime rods.  It is a partnership between a fallible, undisciplined, arbitrary being, and one invented to remind the other of the truth.

 Tick, tock, tick, tock.  We may accept the truth, or we can invent our own.

 

Hope this finds you keeping time,

 

David

 

Copyright © 2022  David Smith