I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T.S. Elliot
Imagine a clock. Not the face of the clock, but the sound.
Listen carefully.
What do you hear? Is it a tick, tick, tick or a tick-tock? Is there a whir of an electric motor? Is there the ding of a bell or maybe the sound of a cuckoo? Perhaps you conjured a digital clock with no sound at all. What a buzzkill that is.
These are the sounds (or hush) of keeping time as we conceive it. Not so long ago, such precise mechanisms did not exist to reliably measure and mete out time. There was the sun and circadian rhythms and later some crude devices, but no timepiece directed all of our lives from moment to moment.
But now everything is clocks everywhere, the little dictators of our lives. We wear them on our wrists, consult them on our phones, and squint up at them as they tower over our towns. Think about it. A clock of all things, Big Ben, is one of the most potent symbols of Great Britain. And don’t get me going about Prague.
Years ago, when I taught English in college, I had a fairly small office that I outfitted with a humongous clock I bought from IKEA. This thing seemed to fill the wall behind my desk, and I loved students’ reactions when they first would see it. I had puckishly hung that absurdity as a lark, but I found it served to disrupt my students’ assumptions by becoming a running joke that helped to dissipate the stuffiness they had anticipated.
Usually during a meeting, a student might glance up to consult that massive clock, and I came to realize that knowing the time gave them an element of control over a situation in which they had the distinct disadvantage. Keeping time, it turns out, can be a comfort. So yes, the clock is a dictator, but in this other way it can also be a liberator.
Clock, the Dictator
Eventually I became a dean, and, in the natural pecking order of academia, I reported to a provost. My boss had only one clock in his large office, an unimpressive institutional timepiece that hung behind whomever he was meeting with — the reverse of my faculty office set-up. Unless you had the temerity to check your watch, only he knew the time at any moment, and whoever controls the time controls the meeting.
I doubt he had the foresight to deliberately position the clock behind his visitors for this purpose, but he certainly exploited its advantage. His manipulation of meeting times was one of the several ways you knew your status. If you were in his good graces, your one-on-one meetings with him would start promptly and linger well beyond their designated end while you chit-chatted about baseball. If you fell out of favor, your meeting might start ridiculously late and last only a few minutes, and then he would mostly just tell you about how he was in a rush to get ready for a lunch meeting even though it was only 10:30 AM. Without ever being told, you knew you were unworthy and unimportant.
Clocks, the Liberating Force
After I grew wise to how my boss used the placement of his clock to manipulate his underlings, I started scattering small clocks all over my office. I had learned that on Dean’s Island clocks are of more consequence than they are in Faculty-land. With my boss as an instructive negative paradigm, I decided that anyone who came into my office for any reason, no matter where they sat, could at the very least see the time.
It didn’t matter whether they were there for a friendly conversation, a demitasse of espresso, a formal one-on-one, a job interview, a yearly review, or even a disciplinary evaluation. They would have the same awareness of the passage of time as I did. A bunch of clocks did not level the playing field, but it was a subtle reassurance, one that certainly did not even register consciously for most. The clocks were a gentle, but effective liberating force, and I liked to think they helped me cultivate healthier relationships with my people than I ever had with my boss.
Clock, the Oppressor
It is difficult to conceive of the world as it once was, without clocks. The precision of time measurement can be a massive distraction and even an obsession. My father is approaching 90, and every conversation he asks me the date and the time, sometimes more than once. He grows anxious about getting ready for dinner hours beforehand. If someone is supposed to come by “in the afternoon,” he gives up on them by 2:30. Time, as measured by clocks, saps his life of its joy.
When I say time, I am not talking about aging. There is no reason that aging should be a joyless experience. In fact, there is considerable evidence that we generally grow more content as we grow older, and I imagine that it is so in some part because we do not need to be as beholden to the clock as when we were working.
But the insidiousness of the clock remains. It infects us and misleads us throughout our lives and can come back to oppress us gratuitously as it seems to have done with my dad.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can all agree that time is not the clock, nor is the clock time any more than the tape measure is length or the scale is weight. Time, really, is just a component of our experience, an element we move through, like air or political scandals. Or maybe time, being odorless, colorless, and ultimately toxic to our existence, is more like carbon monoxide — merely a byproduct of our propulsion through life.
Indeed, it’s the clock’s measurement of time that can be so oppressive, not time itself. Far from abandoning or renouncing the tyranny of the clock, though, we have gone ahead and added even more to our measurement regimes, strolling around with devices that record our heart rates and document our state of activity, even monitor our sleep! We are rapidly out-clocking the clock apparently under the ludicrous conviction that everything that can be counted counts.
Short of stranding on a desert island or some such thing, we can no longer escape the ceaseless tally of Clock, the Dictator. We are Clock’s servants, humble or otherwise, and Clock is a relentless overseer. So render unto Clock what is Clock’s, but keep time for yourself.
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