by Daniel Olivieri
“Just as fitting as the inventor of the watch being a locksmith is that the mythological Fates were weavers. The shortest threads sewing shops sell are 1800 feet long, the length of five football fields. Can you imagine how unwieldy it would be to handle all that thread if we didn’t have spools to wrap it around? The months, weeks, and years are the spools we wrap our time around. Without them, time would be as unmanageable as a tangled clump of thread.”
It is no accident that the inventor of the watch was a locksmith. A similar impulse underlies both contraptions. A lock keeps your possessions safe; a watch keeps the time. The difference, of course, is that while a lock will stop your valuables from being stolen, the best a watch can do is let you observe the exact rate at which your most valuable possession is taken from you. Has there ever been a thief as thorough as time? Masked and gloved, the cat burglar tosses a grappling hook through an open window, scales the brick wall of your home, and sneaks off with your diamonds, your grandmother’s antique silverware, your whole collection of Mughal era coins. Time needs no mask: it is invisible already. It needs no gloves: it has no fingerprints. If it did, those fingerprints would be on everything; it would be an accessory to every crime. With no bag to put it in, time takes not just the silverware, but the table. Not just the Mughal coin, but the Mughal empire. As they say, everything we’re ever given in this life we’ll one day have to give up. Time is what we give it up to. So who wouldn’t want to resist this robbery? Who doesn’t understand the wish to lock time away like a stash of jewels, to put manacles on it, to grip it with both hands?
It is our most idiosyncratic dimension. Distance and weight politely comply with the demands of the metric system. They are happy to be sliced into even tenths. Time is not so compliant; it refuses to be decimalized. The French National Assembly attempted this during the revolution—instituting ten hour days and ten day weeks. But the seven day week would not go into exile. It went into hiding instead. Priests kept calendars in secret. Instead of resting only on the tenth day, the décadi, some citizens rested on décadi and whatever day Sunday happened to fall on. The only person who proposed a workable schedule for leap years was guillotined before his suggestion could be accepted. After twelve years, Napoleon nixed this newfangled calendar and returned to the Gregorian one. The French had fought the days of the week and lost. This is no surprise: everyone loses to time eventually. And so we give time the concessions it demands: leap years, daylight savings, the occasional leap second. We cannot avoid it. Stand as still as you want: time will move you forwards nonetheless. Anyone who has ever barely missed a train or hurt a friend with a careless word is familiar with how utterly unforgiving time is. You want to shout at time to go backwards. “Just ten minutes! Just five minutes. Can you make an exception, just this once?” But time does not bargain. If it did, I would happily exchange half my afternoons for more mornings and evenings. And February—is there any market, foreign or domestic, that I can trade in my Februaries? I'd even do it at an unfavorable exchange rate. An extra twelve days of June, maybe? The closest one can get is to do what Arctic terns and wealthy people do and just switch hemispheres to get twice the usual allotment of summers per year.
But if time is eccentric and unforgiving, then at least it’s quite dependable. With their uniformity and certainty, calendars feel like periodic tables of time. You can see the last days of the previous month and the first days of the following month at the beginning and end, looking a little embarrassed to be caught in a picture in which they don’t belong. But while next year’s calendar might feel full of promise (who knows what I might be up to on August 7th next year?), the next millennium’s calendar registers as eerie. I do not know what cataclysms, invasions, and extinctions will have occurred by September 20th, 3025 but I do know that it will fall on a Tuesday. How odd is it that we say that a particular date “falls" on a day of the week? As if someone were holding the dates of the year aloft and dropping them down one at a time onto the unending scroll of week days.
But what if this person were to lose their aim? What if time were to abandon its trademark dependability? Thursday might overstay its welcome, squeezing Friday into just a few hours. Tuesday could get lost and not show up on time. The Sunday you had expected not due to arrive for another week. “Sorry, our mid-week yoga class is canceled—we ran out of Wednesdays to have it on.” This type of chaos has happened before. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the Julian Calendar into the Gregorian calendar, removing ten days from the middle of October in the process. But he didn't sew up the wound: he had October 4th directly followed by October 15th. But this is far from time’s only regularly scheduled irregularity. The days don’t always fit snugly into the year resulting in misfit days with no week or month to call home. The Baháʼí calendar has four or five intercalary months a year known as the Ayyám-i-Há during which believers exchange gifts and celebrate the transcendence of God above His attributes. The ancient Egyptian calendar had five epagomenal days which existed outside of any year. The ancient Babylonian calendar would occasionally have an intercalary month added to it by royal decree. While our ways of marking the days of the year have changed, so have the days and the years themselves. During the Cretaceous, the year was 372 days long and the day was 23½ hours long. The Earth is slowing down.
Just as fitting as the inventor of the watch being a locksmith is that the mythological Fates were weavers. The shortest threads sewing shops sell are 1800 feet long, the length of five football fields. Can you imagine how unwieldy it would be to handle all that thread if we didn’t have spools to wrap it around? The months, weeks, and years are the spools we wrap our time around. Without them, time would be as unmanageable as a tangled clump of thread.
Imagine if you were one of the Fates and you chose to unwind the universe? To spin the years back onto their bobbin, one week at a time. Sunday Saturday Friday Thursday Wednesday Tuesday Monday. Planes would move backwards across the sky, orca whales would open their mouths to let their prey spring forth suddenly unharmed, baseballs would fly back from the out field to tap against the batter’s swing and then zip back into the pitcher’s hand. Sunday Saturday Friday Thursday Wednesday Tuesday Monday. Workers would scurry around the pyramids, removing blocks. They would go back to before the Babylonians invented the seven day week and keep on going, adding the days of the week post hoc to the eons that came before it. Sunday Saturday Friday Thursday Wednesday Tuesday Monday. At some point, you would get back to the Big Bang itself and see whatever being, deity or demiurge, set it in motion and note down exactly what day of the week it all began.
But what if we pointed our attention in the other direction? A friend gave me a pirated copy of photoshop that had been hacked in a surprisingly sublime manner. They’d done it by somehow getting access to the variable that determined the number of days the free trial would last. That variable had originally been set to seven. This hacker had changed it to eleven million. That’s about thirty thousand years. I found this a bit disconcerting. One expects to confront one’s own mortality in a graveyard, not in a photo editing application. The Sumatran Rhino will go extinct, Gamma Cephei will replace Polaris as the Northern pole star, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, every word in every language currently spoken will fall out of use, Chernobyl will become safe to return to, the red giant Antares will supernova, and only then will I have to start paying for photoshop.
While it’s difficult to comprehend the passage of time on that massive scale, it’s also just difficult to comprehend the passage of time at all. Look out the window of a plane or from the top of a mountain and you’ll see space spread out beneath you as far as you care to look. But where do we go to get a panoramic view of time? How could we ever look at something we can’t possibly see?
This is how my family did it.
We always did it in the morning because my sister had learned in third grade that gravity slowly shrinks you throughout the day so that we are a centimeter shorter when we go to bed than when we wake up (we knew it was scientific and correct because it was in metric). Part of the ritual was that right before putting the pencil to the tops of our heads, my Dad would jokingly check to make sure that we weren’t standing on our tiptoes. The implication was that we’d grown so much that the possibility of cheating had to be considered. Once he’d confirmed we were not playing a trick, we would stand up very straight. It was satisfying to feel the wall flush against your back. I can still remember the pencil against my scalp as he’d move it back and forth to draw a messy line. Stepping away from the wall to look at the new line felt like opening a gift on Christmas or getting a new book out of the library. There was a special joy to that third of an inch of painted wall. It wasn’t just a little bit of wall. It was the difference between who you had been and who you were now. But when had this change happened? What could be more familiar than Monday afternoons and Wednesday mornings and Friday evenings? But these two pencil marks on the wall reminded you that as you ran for the school bus in the morning and cut out construction paper in art class and talked about your day at dinner, without you even knowing it, you were making your way up that wall. Each day seemed to leave you unchanged, but each year you felt immensely different. Who wouldn’t want to study this subtle, omnipresent force that existed nowhere but affected everything? Can’t we understand the need to create calendars and wristwatches and epagomenal days to have some way to comprehend this mysterious force we are all always caught inside?
This essay is essentially a 1900-word long highlight reel of my favorite time-themed facts spliced with my favorite time-themed daydreams; it's research merged with reverie. My life often feels like one long reverie that's only occasionally interrupted by the real world, so essays like this give me the chance to invite other people into the state of mind where I spent quite a bit of my time.
Daniel Olivieri is a software developer living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, The Avalon Review, Fourth Genre, and Litro, among others. The collaborative novel he contributed to, Mikado, The Cartographer, & the Attachment Postal Service is currently available from La Piccioletta Barca. His hobbies include carving owls out of wood and sewing pillowcases. You can find more of his work at www.epigraphing.com.