There is a scene from the PBS series Downton Abbey that I think of often. The show, which takes place in World War I era England, portrays the interconnected lives of a family of aristocrats and the people who serve them. When the new heir to the Abbey, a working lawyer, says that he will have time to attend to the affairs of the estate on the weekend, the 80-year-old dowager countess turns to him and asks, “But what is a weekend?”
The weekend is so familiar to us now that it is almost impossible to imagine another way of parsing our work and rest cycles, just as it is almost impossible to imagine any other way of marking our day than with a 12-hour clock. But time is a very recent invention, as is the clock, writes Joe Zadeh in “The Tyranny of Time,” an excellent article out this month from Noemi Magazine, a new publication from the Berggruen Institute. The uniformity of how we measure time has taken a significant toll on our connection to nature, our bodies, and our relationship to pleasure.
“The clock is a useful social tool,” writes Zadeh, “but it is also deeply political: It benefits some, marginalizes others, and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us...It is frequently altered and adjusted to fit social and political purposes.” Prior to the advent of the clock, people marked time in different ways, from sundials in ancient Egypt to the budding of plants and the arrival of migrating animals in the Americas to water clocks in Africa and hourglasses in Europe. Inherent in these time-keeping systems was a connection to the natural world and to our own internal observations. Time was a regional, if not local agreement. Cities marked noon as the moment when the sun was at its apex in the sky. The advent of railroads and the dawn of industrialization required the standardization of time, which served to further alienate us from our circadian rhythms and from the environment. 1884 marked a pivotal moment when, at the International Meridian Conference, the globe was sliced into time zones synchronized to the British Empire’s standard time zone, GMT. From this moment on, regardless of where the sun is in the sky, 12 PM is noon.
As the demand for precision and uniformity of time grew, the centralized clock in England was replaced with independent devices that use crystal quartz oscillators known as atomic clocks. These instruments redefined time, Zadeh writes, “not as a fraction of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, but as a specific number of oscillations of cesium atoms.” Despite the precision, atomic clocks still need to be adjusted one millisecond every six weeks, a flaw that needed to be addressed in order to develop the next wave of colonization: space travel. An error of one second over years could mean the difference between landing on Mars or missing it by hundreds of thousands of miles. NASA is working on the Deep Space Atomic Clock which uses mercury-ion and only loses one second every 10 million years. With this clock, we will be able to synchronize time across the universe.
It is hard to separate the increasingly sensitive and uniform measure of time from capitalism. Time as money, time wasted or spent, are all fairly recent concepts arising from the connection between labor, time, access to resources and, our perceived value on this planet.
The pandemic has caused many of us to recalibrate our relationship to time. For some, time has sped up with the urgency of securing shelter, food, and work. For others, time has felt stretchy and endless. Languishing, a feeling of being untethered from time, is a common pandemic expression that mental health practitioners are hearing from their patients. Perhaps we are being given an opportunity to rethink the clock. Artist David Horvitz, in his 2016 work Proposals for Clocks, suggests a few: “A clock that is wound by the wind. A clock that follows the shadows of cats. A clock whose seconds are synchronized to your heartbeat. A clock whose minutes are the lengths of your breaths. A clock that falls asleep.”
As scientists and explorers invent increasingly precise ways to measure and manufacture time, I propose that we also bring pleasure into the mix. Perhaps we can develop clocks that rely on our bodies as instruments of measurement like the daily and seasonal hormonal cycles for men and the monthly menstrual cycles for women. Or, clocks that measure dopamine and or show us how much rest we need. Our relationship with time is fixed only if we allow it. As the great writer William Faulkner said, “Only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
From the Institute of Pleasure Studies
Join us next month for the launch of our book club. We are beginning with Barbara Becker’s Heartwood: LIving with the End in Mind, which I wrote about last week. Watch this space for details.
Read the full essay The Tyranny of Time by Joe Zadeh, It’s a terrific 10-minute read.
The Human Clock, an online clock that’s created with photographs from people all over the world.
A history of alternative units of measurements.