For the past few decades I have marked down the exact day the leaves emerged. Last year it was April 29. The year before, it was May 7. The earliest, since I’ve been keeping track, was April 14. The latest was May 8. It’s always a bit of a roller-coaster ride; winter relinquishes spring unwillingly, it holds on. If a cold front arrives, the entire leaf-opening spectacle is delayed, sometimes for weeks. Forsythia bushes are suspended in perpetual yellow bloom like flowers in a florist’s cooler; magnolia blossoms can be transfixed for two weeks.
Two years ago, when the leaves opened late, I became impatient. I had an impulse to drive south to meet the advancing wave of spring. It was stalled somewhere and I wanted to get to it. About a decade before, I had raced the springtide from Miami to Toronto in an Oldsmobile. It was late February but spring was well underway in southern Georgia, warm enough for me to sleep in the car at a pull-off with the windows rolled down. Outside the car, the leaves had already opened and the night air was filled with the sound of trilling frogs. It felt more like late May in Toronto. The next day I had a slice of homemade pecan pie for breakfast and then continued north, through Georgia and Tennessee, turning back the calendar of spring from May to April to March. As I drove through the southern Appalachian mountains, banded with pink and blue limestone strata like layer cakes, I noticed the thinning of spring’s greenery and by the time I reached Kentucky the buds had only just begun to swell on the trees, while snow still nestled in the roadside hollows. I spent the night at a motel in coal country. The next morning dawned cold, and midway through Ohio snow began to fall. By the time I reached the Canadian border a blizzard was in progress. I’d left summer a thousand miles behind me.
YEARS
The shock wave of spring spreads northwards at sixteen miles a day, a little more than half a mile an hour. You could easily outwalk spring; it takes months to get from Miami to Toronto. Spring’s advance is really the tilt of the earth—fifteen degrees—translated into movement as our planet circles the sun. Starting in late December and accelerating after March 21, the northern hemisphere of the earth begins tipping towards the sun like a sun worshipper on a beach. The sun rises a little higher in the sky each day, pulling the tide of spring behind it like the wedding train of Venus. It’s so dependable you could set your watch by it.
Even without a calendar to guide me I know that my “leaf clock” is accurate to within three weeks, at least for Toronto. I’m like the early humans who had no calendars or clocks. They looked for signs: the arrival or departure of migratory birds, the blooming or seeding of plants. And there’s a lot of redundancy in the natural calendar—it’s no problem when the signs are delayed. Here in Toronto if the night-hawks are late, the fiddlehead ferns will still unfurl like clockwork. If there’s a cold snap that delays the leaf opening by a week or two, the first swallowtail butterfly will always be on schedule some warm May afternoon. These are backups.
The sun is more precise. If I jam a piece of wood in a crevice on a large, flat rock so tightly that even winter storms can’t budge it, I’ve built a solar observatory. I can use it to measure the length of the noon-hour shadow and mark it out with scratches on the rock throughout the year. Although the distance between one day and the next is minimal, if I wait for twenty-nine days, one lunar cycle, there is a measurable difference where the noon shadow of the stick ends. This is the beginning of astronomy. Every summer solstice the shadow will land in exactly the same place. From here it is a hop to Stonehenge, Egyptian pyramids and Galileo. But I’m getting ahead of myself. A year is easy to measure by this method, even in the tropics, where eternity lingers in the seasonless months.
MONTHS, WEEKS, DAYS AND HOURS
Yesterday, the first of May, the leaves opened. It was hot in the afternoon, and everyone seemed to be out walking—young mothers with rubber-wheeled strollers, kids on noisy skateboards and old couples walking arm in arm. The warm wind had a buoyancy to it, a softness tempered by the moist air, and it felt as if the whole city had been secretly towed overnight to the Caribbean. I spent the afternoon weeding and resetting the frost-jumbled bricks that divide my garden from the lawn. I also took my outdoor table and chairs out of the garage, wiped off the winter grit and set them up on the patio. It was good to be out in the sun.
The evening continued warm, and after sunset I sat out with a glass of wine to toast the moonrise over the newly solidifying crowns of the trees. It was a waning moon that rose late like a big, lopsided orange into the warm embrace of a May night. It orbited low in the sky the way a summer moon does, and its skin shimmered with a faded chiaroscuro of dark craters and pale deserts. The moon’s disc was surrounded by a faint yellow corona, tinged at the edges with green. Although waning, it was still bright enough to lay shadows across my back lawn. I had to remind myself that moonlight was second-hand, that it reflected off lunar geography and travelled through airless desolation to reach me. No wonder it seemed to hypnotize what it touched. The moon that night was like an elliptical map of crumbling, empty civilizations, a fossil cameo lighting a sky that seemed almost green. Leaf green.
There were so many new leaves opening in the darkness you could almost hear them unfurling. The night was filled with chlorophyll, soaked in a deep, nocturnal emerald, and the warm air was perfumed with the fresh scent of millions of new leaves. Their raw, primal verdancy, the delicate and immeasurable power of their growth, saturated the twilight. Millions of leaves were hatching like green butterflies from their chrysalis buds, their wings unfolding into leaves. When the next full moon ascends, those leaves will have reached full size—the shape they’ll hold all summer.
If I made a record of each full moon by scratching a circle above the noon scratch on my rudimentary solar calendar, I’d discover that there were about twelve full moons in a year. It’s a natural way to divide the year, and very early in our history, years were recognized to have twelve months. Alexander Marshak, an anthropologist who specializes in the interpretation of ancient artifacts, has deciphered what he believes to be the first lunar calendar. Discovered in 1960 in Uganda, it is a twenty-thousand-year-old piece of carved bone with a series of lines incised into it. If Marshak is right, this stone-age artifact (called the Ishango bone) pre-dates the earliest confirmed lunar calendar—on a Babylonian clay tablet from 750 B.C.—by seventeen thousand years.
Lunar phases, whenever they began to be observed, provided the first monthly calendar for humans, and several religions, notably Judaism and Islam, still base the timing of their observances on the lunar cycle. Of the two, Islam is arguably the most strictly lunar; all of Islam’s important religious observances begin only when a cleric has made the first visual sighting of the moon’s crescent.
Today, regardless of the religious and sacred associations, calendars are largely secular, and very practical. They measure months, weeks and days in a gradated scale of chronometric precision, from coarse to fine, that allows us to plan our lives. A calendar is a bit like predicting the future. Which could be why the superstition arose that it’s bad luck to look ahead in a calendar, although anyone who believes this must not get much done, because a calendar is the most basic of day-planners. And days are the most natural division of time. The circadian rhythm of night and day shaped the earliest origins of life and is the basic pulse of our existence. Weeks, instead, are much more abstract.
By 400 B.C. the Greeks were unique amongst their fellow civilizations in following a planetary week, in which a different planet—the Sun, Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—ruled each of the seven days. When Alexander the Great conquered Asia between 323 and 336 B.C., he brought this system to Egypt, where it caught on. It’s with us still, in both French and English, though more obviously in French. The English week has Saturday (Saturn’s day) and Sunday (the Sun’s day), but Francophones have lundi (the Moon’s day), mardi (Mars), mercredi (Mercury), vendredi (Venus) and a remnant of Jupiter in jeudi.
Most other civilizations around the Mediterranean continued to
follow an eight-day, or nundinum, cycle for centuries afterwards, although, for their own reasons, the Jews also observed a seven-day week. These inconsistent calendars remained unchanged for millennia, until the rise of the Roman Empire. Rome had inherited an eight-day nundinum from the Etruscans, but as their empire grew they were eventually exposed to the Egyptian system. Rome had always had a soft spot for mystery cults and practices originating in the Middle East, particularly if they came from Egypt. And the Egyptian association of individual gods with particular days was just too much to resist. The curious thing is that the seven-day week hadn’t already arrived in Rome along with everything else Hellenistic—Roman culture was 90 percent Greek, after all. But for some reason the seven-day week had to be exported from Greece to Egypt and then to Rome. The Roman adoption of the seven-day week came gradually, between 50 B.C. and A.D. 30. By A.D. 79, the year of the eruption of Vesuvius, it had been instituted throughout most of the Roman Empire.
The seven-day week was also a better fit with the lunar month, dividing more evenly into the twenty-nine-day cycle. Lunar months had always posed a problem for calendar makers. Early on, probably about 3,500 years ago, the Babylonians found that the solar year gradually got out of harmony with the lunar year. They calculated that by adding a day to their lunar month, changing the number of days in a year from 348 to 360, their calendars would agree more correctly with the length of the solar year. But eventually even this system got out of synchronization, so they devised a new, complicated method that changed the number of days in a year to as few as 353 and as many as 385.
The Egyptians adopted the Babylonian calendar early, probably by 3,000 B.C., though they simplified it by abandoning the lunar months altogether and instituting a 365-day calendar based on the flood patterns of the Nile River. Each month had thirty days, and at the end of every year, five additional days were added. This was the system that was passed on to the Romans. The Romans, however, soon noticed troubling minor discrepancies between the Egyptian calendar and the solar year, and it became Julius Caesar’s obsession to devise a perfect calendar. The calendar he created is essentially the one in use today throughout the world, though it was fine-tuned slightly by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and as a result is now called the Gregorian calendar. But how did the Egyptians come up with hours, and why are there twenty-four of them in a day? Lunar months are a natural division, as are years and days. Hours, on the other hand, have a slightly more ambiguous and numerological pedigree.
The number twelve held a mystical significance for the Egyptians. It was probably because the year divided naturally into twelve lunar months that the priests of Ra likewise decreed that day and night would each be divided into twelve hours. But these “hours” were not of equal length. At the time of the winter solstice in Alexandria, the night lasts fourteen hours and the day ten hours, making an hour of night seventy minutes long and an hour of day only fifty minutes long. The Egyptians probably guessed this, but without clocks there was no way for the hours to be accurately measured. By 1600 B.C. both Egypt and Babylon had clepsydras, or water clocks, that used water dripping from one measured container into another to determine equal lengths of time. The trouble was that the clocks were finicky and temperature-sensitive; when the water cooled at night, “time” would flow twice as fast. Still, the twenty-four-hour day prevailed and ultimately became the world standard. Yet the division of hours into minutes had to wait for thousands more years after the Egyptians.
In some sense, even with all my clocks—the digital clock on my stove, my analogue watch and my various wall clocks—the passage of the hours strikes me as mysterious. Clock time seems abstract and disconnected from my own experience of continuous time—the rising of the moon, the setting stars. As François Rabelais wrote, “I never follow the clock: hours were made for man, not man for hours.”
This morning, on my own time, I opened the blinds onto a new world—an empire of green. My house was flooded with emerald light. Overnight, in the moonlight, the trees had transformed from budmisted scaffolds into leafy landscapes. Summer was underway, and the boughs of the trees were restless in the breezy morning air, alive with their new weight of life. A new season had begun, and I felt a slight poignancy. But there is nothing sentimental about this lushness; it means business. We measure our years by seasons, and with each successive year those seasons are more deeply marked by the memories of seasons past. And the seasons unspool the story of our lives.
MINUTES
I stood on the bridge at midnight,
As the clocks were striking the hour.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Clocks have been with us for about seven hundred years, since the late thirteenth century. There is some evidence that the Chinese constructed one almost six hundred years before that, but for one reason or another they abandoned the technology, leaving it for the Europeans to reinvent. It seems strange that the Dark Ages, which stretched from the end of the Roman Empire in A.D. 450 to the beginning of the high Middle Ages in A.D. 1100, hatched the technology of time measurement, but it did. This was partially because of the rise of monasticism. Clocks, along with Anno Domini (A.D., in the year of our Lord), we owe to Christianity.
Monasteries not only kept the flame of civilization lit by translating Greek and Roman texts, they also provided the kind of stable, scholastic environment that fostered technical innovation. Cloistered monks needed an accurate way to schedule their many daily prayers, and this called for a fail-safe method of timing. At first they used calibrated candles, hourglasses and sundials, but all of these had limitations. It was the mechanics of devotion, for keeping an appointment with the divine, that propelled the evolution of their timekeeping devices. After all, the heavenly realm had its own schedule, one that transcended the vagaries of seasonal changes in the length of day and night. As early as the eleventh century, monasteries had built mechanical devices attached to bells that announced prayer time, and it was these machines, or at least the concept behind them, that provided the basis for the invention of the clock. Clocks, at their very inception, already had one cog in the otherwordly.
It was no accident, then, that the first true mechanical clock was installed at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire, England, in A.D. 1283. Twelve years earlier, a key component, something called the “escapement,” had been designed by a technician known to history only as Robert the Englishman. The escapement was a clever invention that used toothed wheels, counterweights and drive-gears to convert the downward force exerted by gravity on a drive weight into a regular mechanical movement. Within a decade the escapement, and the clocks that it powered, had spread across Europe. Large public clock towers were erected in many European cities. At first a great number of them had no clock faces and only sounded bells on the hour. It took a few more decades until the first dials, with a single hand to mark the hours, appeared.
Public clocks must have seemed exceptionally modern at the time. They were the first mechanical technology to surpass Rome’s, and the first sign that the Middle Ages were beginning to draw to a close. A public clock tower with a dial face marking the hours was a radical innovation, not just because time itself had become magically visible, but also because all those who heard its bells could co-ordinate their daily activities. Shops and markets began to keep regular hours; appointments could be co-ordinated for anyone within earshot.
Tourists travelled in from the country just to stand and stare at these marvels, particularly the most advanced ones, which had dials embraced by scrolled brackets and carved figures that held the clock face like a votive object. But no matter how clocks were dressed up in classical ornamentation, nothing could conceal the austere, geometric modernity of the clock face itself—a window into time. It must have been an extraordinary period, particularly for the wealthy, who could afford to have smaller, personal clocks built for domestic use, much like the first personal computers of the 1980s. We take clock dials for granted now. They even look a bit quaint beside an LCD digit
al time display, but they still have a decided modernity to them.
The clock face was a practical solution to the problem of representing the passage of twenty-four hours compactly and simply. All previous timepieces had relied on a linear and often interrupted operation—hourglasses had to be turned upside down when they ran out, clepsydras had to be refilled and maintained at a constant temperature, calibrated candle clocks simply burned down, and sundials could only tell time when the sun was out. The mechanical clock was new, it had its own source of energy. It was independent, almost alive. It was as if a portion of the great river of time had been diverted into a minor eddy, confined and harnessed within the clockwork gears and cogs of the timepiece. Inevitably, those same gears would quantify human lives themselves.
Above my desk I have a digital, Olympic-style time clock that measures not just hours, minutes and seconds, but tenths and even hundredths of seconds. I use it like a chronometric mascot to spur me on; according to it, time isn’t just passing, it’s flying. The clock’s face is a sliding spectrum of time, from coarse to fine. On the left the unmoving hours are posted like newspaper headlines. Next comes the stately procession of minutes, then the seconds ticking by. To the right are the tenths of seconds. They pass by distressingly fast. But it is the hundredths of seconds that I find fascinating. They’re hypnotic, like a waterfall or a light show. They dance furiously, flashing by so quickly I can’t read them. Most wall clocks advance stealthily, almost imperceptibly, but this one gushes. My Olympic clock constantly reminds me that my leisurely perspective on time is an illusion.
Soul of the World Page 4
