#5: The Sundial
For something which holds such an important role in telling the time, this is quite an unassuming object — small, light. An ornament more than a tool, engraved with a quotation:
‘Grow old along with me the best is yet to be’
The origin of this quotation? They are the first lines of ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ by Robert Browning, reused by John Lennon in the song ‘Grow Old With Me’.
Combining this quotation with the sundial, the subject is clear: time, and how it is spent.
The world’s concept of time is lineal, set, and never-ceasing. While we may be finite in this physical world (as far as we know), time is infinite. Eternal, potentially. Can you imagine before time began?
But for us, it remains finite, and our concept of time is one that constantly pervades our lives.
After a quick visit to Wikipedia, I find this explanation of a sundial’s value:
‘In addition to their time-telling function, sundials are valued as decorative objects, as literary metaphors and as objects of mathematical study.’
Of course, literary metaphors is what catches my eye in this sentence. More importantly, metaphors in general, whether literary or as a part of life.
However, Wikipedia also has this to say:
‘It is common for inexpensive mass-produced decorative sundials to have incorrectly aligned gnomons and hour-lines, which cannot be adjusted to tell correct time.’
If a sundial, this sundial most likely included, is incorrect and cannot tell the correct time, does the metaphor change? Do we have an altered, deformed, broken notion of time? And, what’s more, is that a bad thing?
Our world is set on a concept of time in which every day has 24 hours, and each of those 24 hours is counted. You cannot escape time, you cannot take a step out of time, however much you may wish to when a deadline is looming or everything is just getting too much. No matter how emotional we may get, how irrational, time carries on. It is something humanity remains unable to control.
Yet, while we cannot control it, we do not necessarily have to acknowledge it to its exactness. If our sundial is broken, we cannot tell the hour of the day. We can make an educated guess as to which part of the day we are in — the morning, afternoon, twilight, nighttime — but we cannot know the exact hour, we cannot have the definiteness. We lose our numbers, and are faced with generalisations. We cannot be exact.
We must then function in a way that does not need exactness. This morning, while waiting for my coffee to brew, I decided that I would take 2 minutes of silent private thinking time as I sat in the kitchen, alone. Reaching a pausing point in my musings, I turned to check the coffee, and also the time — 4 minutes had passed by.
It had not felt like 4 minutes, it had felt barely a moment. I was lost in my mental reasoning and musings, with nothing external to jog me out of this. No alarm was set, and so I was not exact. My coffee was 2 minutes stronger, which I certainly wasn’t going to complain about.
But that moment, that experience of time passing measured against an exact counting, jolted my own sense of time. What, I ask myself, would it be like to live without the exactness of a clock? What would it be like to live in the present, modern day world, without a timepiece?
Putting aside some of the impracticalities of this hypothesis, let us think more of the conceptions that we hold, and how they would change. Take work, for instance. You no longer would be able to measure how many hours you have worked. Instead, you would work until you felt that you needed a break, or until you felt that it was truly finished. Would this lead to less effort being put into work, or more?
How about sleep. If we were unable to count the hours we have slept, to say that we have met the recommended daily dosage, would we sleep more or less? Would we feel more rested?
I could go on, but my point is here. Without time, our actions and our concepts would shift. I am not saying that this would be better or worse. It is a hypothesis searching not for progress but for curiosity. Imagine a world without time, and our concepts no longer contain that world.
