A simple circle, it is the direct descendant of the sundial, connecting us to the mysteries of our forebears and their weird scientific achievements, to a time when the sky told humans how to live. Start with the second hand, if it has one, and as you settle in, move to the minute. The clock offers such a simple connection to the rest of the world. It’s so easygoing compared with that screaming phone, which for me has become an endless scroll of death tolls and terrifying updates from our leaders. Allow yourself only this one small item: an analog clock. The hands evoke the rotation of the earth, the movements of celestial objects, the cosmos.Īn analog clock gives you just enough information to keep you tethered to the world without overwhelming you. On the elegant analog clock, meanwhile, time swells and recedes, like waves and seasons and life. I’ll go on - falsely implying that time is a series of snapshots, a stop-action film rather than the seamless flux that it is. The clunky digital clock, by contrast, jerks along, stopping every minute like a Beckett character - I can’t go on. Every minute, every second, the hands refute Zeno’s paradox: They move continuously, never pausing artificially on one number, passing through an infinite series of fractions of time - a visual demonstration of the fact that time is always in motion. (You could “call time” free of charge back then, dialing 976-1616 to hear a sentence that has never quite left my mind: “At the tone, the time will be. When I was a kid, I loved all clocks - atomic clocks, clock radios, even clocks you couldn’t see. The delightful key to the puzzle is that the numbers on the clock’s face represent more than one value simultaneously. When it points to 1, it means 5, as in five minutes. The shorter one is simple: Whichever number it points to is the hour. (I understood the world I knew was gone forever when I had to teach a college student how to operate an envelope.) I weep not for the stick shift and could never refold a map without making a crumpled mess, but I can’t imagine going through life without being able to read a clock.įor any aliens (or little sisters) reading this: The analog clock, with its ring of numbers 1 through 12 around a circumference, has two “hands,” one short, one long, affixed to the center and pointing outward, which revolve by force of a tiny mechanical engine. No doubt that skill is disappearing from the populace, along with an avalanche of others: driving a stick shift, writing by hand, navigating by memory, using stamps.
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