Clock Time 

                                                                                                              -  Usque nunc stat

 

In the house I grew up there was a clock in every room, sometimes two or three. All kinds of clocks, antiquey ones with square, mottled faces, and hands like claws delicately pointing to Roman numerals; big round plain ones with dark muscular fingers, and a red unstoppable second hand like a  vein slowly, noiselessly tracing a circle; small, precious tabletop clocks that hid shyly behind potted plants or books and needed to be reminded every week that they were falling behind, and of course the stately grandfather clock, inherited as all such objects must be, as silent as a sequoia, an old-timer that neither had nor needed hands nor pendulum to tell its inferiors just who was in charge mortality.

 

There were others. Old wind-ups that had run down and stared blankly at a couch or a window, exhausted by all the  hours they had wasted working to keep up with their neighbors; small unmemorable, portable dials as characterless as walls and light bulbs and meant to witness only the daily, mini-marathons run in kitchens, linen rooms and hallways. And as a concession to the modern world that  intruded on the comforts of history, there was even a crude electronic, digital clock, the built-in alternative face of the green plastic radio housing it, whose bright, red, electric lines blinked the minutes away. 

 

Finally, as if moments could shine, poised like a magical astrolabe encased in a museum cabinet, there was the golden clock on the mantel, my father’s favorite, with its works, gears, springs, it's very movement visible, all protected by a spotless glass cylinder, and wound every evening after dinner to prepare the family for the perfectly transparent, predictably well-run day that would surely greet us in the morning.

 

These were all my father’s clocks, and I hated them. Why would anyone want to know that time was passing? Even as a child, I knew that time was all we had, and that it was meant to be endless. What was the alternative?  Time could never be registered by any measuring device, much less one that presumed to represent the present moment on what was called a face. For what were clocks mired in except the present? And the present was there whether it was time or timeless. The clocks were a daily reminder to me, at the age of six and at the age of 17, that I was foolish to think I could live forever. Mortality was a fact of life I thought no one should ever be forced to live with, let alone observe and count down. I still think that, though I too now have a clock in every room, and seven or eight fanciful,  unapologetic wristwatches in my dresser drawer that have long outlived their practicality. If I decide to wear one to an event, say as a fashion statement, no one ever knows it is stuck on a moment that happened 11 years ago. 

 

I loved my father without reservation, without reason, and believed almost until he died that nothing he did was wrong or mistaken. His fascination with clocks seemed to surpass his interest in time. Had I got it wrong, and did he feel clocks outlived time? Long before I left home I vowed that this one compulsive, mysterious love of his was something I’d never repeat. His apparent need  to display the measurable passing of every hour or minute was inconceivable to me, though it impressed friends of his who admired the jewelry and furniture produced during the many hours his craftsmanship required. To them the clocks showed my father’s scorn for this most basic of mankind’s curses: wasted time. His artistry had kept his genius for all things technical safe from the rewards of fame and fortune, and lasted until the birth of personal computers, with their crass  dependence on the speed of light and only two unchanging Arabic numbers.

 

I think now that my father had so many clocks in the house for the same reason I do: he couldn’t help it. Clocks, while they name and track time, and keep us synced to the people and events around us, can also seem to capture time, to promise it, to hold us in it like an aspic while we’re doing all those timeless things. To give meaning to, say 3:15 p.m. when nothing else will or could. Or to 9:11 a.m. Or is it 9:34?  Midnight, we all know, is no longer even a time but a concept, an excuse, a tradition. 

 

We have to wonder why clocks get all the attention. Con men don’t need billable hours to get paid. Nine to five gets to be unbearable, even infuriating if you watch the clock: no wonder people used to punch in. Soccer games add stoppage time to the clock. Train stations have made many a clock as important as the train it’s watching. Afternoon keeps its drudgery safely hidden behind a wall of morning,  Dusk is daylight’s way of avoiding evening. Night uses time to make darkness invisible. But darkness can happen at any time of day. And who can ever know when sunrise begins?

 

Daylight savings time wouldn’t exist without human intervention. Or think of all the milestones that depended for their existence on a calendar. Farmers, it is said, keep a small sky under their pillow that wakes them with a ringing blue dawn. In kindergartens everywhere, and in football stadiums, there are time outs.  Astronomers and artists marvel at time lapse photography. Stopwatches convert gallops, pitches, races and pulses into records. Though fast forwarding seems like cheating, we can only do it with what’s already been recorded.

 

My father spent serious money on several of his clocks, but he never left one to me. After he died I sold one of them to an antiques dealer for nearly $17,000. As they say, time is money. It paid for a memorable trip my wife and I took to  the Amalfi Coast. The other clocks he told me were valuable were worthless. Imitations, the dealer said, without bothering to tell me how he knew. 

 

There are great clocks, of course, greater even than Big Ben, or the one in Grand Central Station. Some are as large as steam engines. In Estonia I once saw a 300-year-old clock inside a dark church that would have taken up my entire living room.  Its face had a 12 foot diameter and sat atop a massive contraption 30-feet high.  I assumed it had been built to mirror the majesty of the lord whose church it was, a tower to inspire the awe that compelled his followers to pray. To pray for more time, in many cases. 

 

I would like to have a clock like that, bigger than me, bigger than my house, bigger than life itself, one that makes time seem beautiful, something tourists come to visit, seem like everything’s about to happen, a clock like a shipful of treasures recovered from a world that’s always disappearing, larger than doom, proof that it has safely resurfaced, fresh, grounded, retrievable, worth every effort, uncreated, time itself traveling to an expanding universe, always within reach, no matter how often we fail to make it, or to keep it.  Let tempus  fugit somewhere else.

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                                                                                                                                 (February, 2021)