I recently bought an hourglass — an antiquated artefact that measures time by the passing of individual grains of sand through a narrow neck from one bloated glass chamber to another. As a sealed unit, the grains pile and tumble silently between, flowing backwards and forwards one hour to the next, turn for turn — at least until the moment, as yet unspecified when it shatters into a million glass fragments and the grains of time trapped in its dimensions dissipate.
As I sit here writing, I am aware of the ticking of a large wall mounted clock in the kitchen. Its steady stroke measures out the seconds of which I am only dimly aware. My grandmother had a squat brown mantelpiece clock which chimed the hour. When I was a child it fascinated me to look up at it surrounded by porcelain figures of Budai, the laughing Buddhist monk and a retinue of attentive smiling children.
The chime is an audible memory that draws me back half a century. I don’t retain many childhood memories but the times I stayed with grandparents resonate for some reason in a way that much of the rest of my childhood doesn’t. Where did all that time go?
My grandmother is long since dead and my father who inherited both the clock and its figurines, among other things has also slipped over the event horizon these many years now. The clock now sits silent in the front room where he whiled away the solemn hours of his retirement, the keys to its mechanism stashed beneath and the figures trapped in a vitrine nearby. Objects with and without mechanisms both tell the time differently.
Today, my youngest daughter turned thirteen. On the fridge there is an old black and white picture of her in my arms holding a milk bottle. I am 44 there and now I am 57. Our cat Onni, who is 15, jumps on the table and settles in my lap. Children and pets tell family time.
Does time stand still? No. But it does have flow and bends and curves around objects and events, something like water. If you believe physicists, it passes differently (and measurably) at the top and bottom of mountains. Some days last forever, others pass without mention. Life is many days, as TS Eliot said.
Why should we put so much faith in such an unreliable substance? Is there an alternative? A better witness to our corporeal experience in this dimension?
The Chinese have, as part of the folklore the concept of hungry ghosts — people who have passed through the veil but who are unable to move into the next dimension, tied to this one by their hungry obsessions. Their necks are described as like the necks of hourglasses choking their unanswered appetites, bellies bloated by an insatiable hunger.
Today we are all time-hungry ghosts. Some yearn for times that have already passed and live in them too. Others live in fear of or anxious anticipation of the future. Very few of us live in the moment. Caught in those other dimensions, the past and the future devour us. Meanwhile time keeps flowing through and past us. Awareness of time passing leads to suffering — particularly so, knowing that we all have event horizons.
But, of all the devices for telling the time, and the best cure for such temporal hungers and suffering, let me recommend nature.
It is timeless yet temporal, linear yet cyclical. It flows through us, around us and over us — like time itself. It draws us back to the moment season for season, whether it’s the first intimation of a dawn chorus after a long winter, a bright flush of green in trees long black or the fullness of a perfect autumn day. Even in the depth of winter, you can find solace in the beauty of evergreen trees when all else is frozen earth.
Before we had devices to measure it or a name to describe it, time never stopped flowing and it will continue, long after we as a species have gone. Bear witness to its power and don’t put too much store by clocks or hourglasses; there are far better and pleasurable ways to measure its passing.
