What Time Is It?

Howard Mansfield (New York Times): Not long ago, clocks were thought to be dangerous. Folklore had it that two of them ticking in the same room could bring “sure death.” It’s easy to see how this belief arose. The clocks were almost certain to disagree, and in the space between two chimings of one hour, uncertainty crept in; the machines’ authority was undermined. We don’t like to be reminded that clock time is a convenient fiction.

Daylight saving time, which begins on Sunday, is unsettling in the same way. Winding the clock forward in March and back in November is like biannually changing the measure of an inch.

This tinkering with clocks is our inheritance from a people obsessed with time.

-eddie