11/1/13
"I don't have the time" is a common complaint that generally comes with a sigh. My mother was wont to say in reply, "Everyone has the same 24 hours." You could sense a question tinged with mild disdain in her unspoken comment, "So what's the matter with you?" But if daylight time is the issue, then everyone has a greater amount of it from the winter solstice to the summer solstice and a lesser amount from the latter back toward the former.
Come 2 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 3, wherever one is in all but two of America's 50 states and in most of Canada, an hour will be added to the day by the deceptively simple task of setting the clocks back 60 minutes. The same thing occurred a week earlier in several countries of the world, all marking the end of daylight savings time for 2013.
If ever there were a strange locution, "daylight savings" is one. No daylight is saved by adjusting a clock. In the fall, the change to what is known as "standard time" allows the light of day to dawn earlier and wane earlier, all the while being more and more attenuated as the December solstice approaches.
Come the second Sunday of March, the clocks are set ahead an hour. The idea is that, as the daylight waxes by virtue of the tilt of the axis combined with Earth's revolving movement, those countries in the Northern Hemisphere, which use the device of daylight savings time, have more daylight during the waking hours of most people. The charcoal briquette and golf course industries are known to have lobbied Congress over the years first to mandate and then maintain daylight savings time.
The sleeping and waking patterns of those who live and move and have their useful being during the day -- especially children -- are frequently disoriented by the change in clock time. When the semiannual shift occurs during a red-eye transcontinental flight in a country as broad as the United States, such disorientation is magnified for all on board.
The concept of "standard time" was a creation of the American railroad system. As its lines grew longer, especially east to west in the expanding nation, rail officials understood that it could not be 10 a.m. in Denver when it was still dark. So time zones were arbitrarily drawn so that 10 a.m. in New York City was 9 a.m. in Chicago, 8 a.m. in Denver, and 7 a.m. in San Francisco. Still, no one was docked so much as a minute in his or her actual time.
Putting the subject in longer perspective is this line from a hymn text by Isaac Watts based on Psalm 90:4-5: Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away; they die, forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.
As Homo sapiens evolved, the measurement of time became more deliberate: first by the seasons of the year, then phases of the moon and the ebbing and flowing of tides. Still that was not enough. The Semitic people later called Jews adopted the seven-day cycle of an earlier agricultural society to mark time between Sabbaths. Soon enough, time was told in hours with the first mechanical clocks built in 13th-century Europe to tell remind monastics when to pray the Divine Office.
Around the end of the 17th century, when smaller portable clocks called "watches" came into existence, the "minute hand," named for the fraction of the hour, made its appearance, giving the measurement of time yet more precision. I wonder who first said, "Just a minute, please?" Eventually, then came the "second hand" and its fractions of minutes and "In a second, dear."
Once in more pious days, I put aside my watch as a personal discipline for Lent and tried to be governed only by the need to complete daily tasks for however long they took without reference to second, minute or hour hand. Abandoning, even for those six weeks, the kind of clock-watching that I for so long had allowed to govern my work life was difficult. I was not supposed to care what time it was but absolutely did.
Whence the anxiety to know what time it is? And what if it is around, say, 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time or 1:31 or 1:31:14? I suppose for some kind of exactitude -- perhaps the launching of NASA rockets -- it is deemed necessary to subdivide the second into parts as in 1:31:14:24.
Lewis Carroll was uncaring of such a thing when he wrote: "The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax -- Of cabbages -- and kings -- And why the sea is boiling hot -- And whether pigs have wings." Time in Carroll's case was, as we would say today, "Whenever."
By contrast, the aforementioned railroad industry found it necessary in its earlier days to demand that the operation of its trains be regulated by both exact hour and minute. The operating book of rules of a line once known as the Chicago and West Michigan Railroad put it this way under the heading: "The Standard of Time": The exact time will be telegraphed to all stations at 9 o'clock each morning. The watches of all conductors, engineers must be regulated by this standard. No excuse will be taken for variation of watches.
Why? Because before the days of computerized signaling, trains were operated by timetable. A locomotive engineer running his train on the same track as an opposing train had to keep to his appointed schedule so to be able to pull his cars into a sidetrack in time to avoid a collision. According to company rules, the time kept by an engineer's watch could not vary by more than five seconds in a single trip.
Here endeth this essay about time. Do enjoy that extra hour of sleep this weekend, but remember that you'll have to give it back come March. Gotta go. Time's a'wastin'.