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In Search of Lost Time and a Watch Battery
Being among the last bearers of wristwatches, I occasionally need a watch battery, and these are difficult to find now.
Time is a curious concept. In one sense it can be said to be abstract, measurable only in observing the rotations and tilts of this shaky planet as it wobbles its elliptical orbit around the sun.
Christians perceive time as linear – it began with Creation and will end with Creation as God decides.
Other faith tradition say that time is a sort of cosmic sea, Samsara, and that life in its cycles of repetition is beyond time, sort of like waiting for an arrival or departure at Newark International Airport.
Before some clever German invented the clock, the measurement of time was dependent on where the sun was, and this varies greatly with the seasons. The monastic hours of lauds, prime, terce, sex, nones, vespers, compline, and matins regulated the day for monasteries and thus universities, businesses, and royal courts. However, monastic hours vary with the seasons, and, anyway, how can anyone determine compline and lauds on a rainy night?
When we speak of time we usually think of small and immediate measurements predicated on the solar day and broken up into hours, minutes, and seconds. Thus, while the concept of first light was (and remains) an appointed time for the beginning of a day on the farm, business appointments require more detailed measurements.
The Middle Ages (they are dark only to those who will not learn history) gave us all sorts of mechanical clocks thanks to the concept of fitting an escapement to geared wheels. The pocket watch, at first as bulky as a turnip, came later. And, really, who wants to carry a turnip around, even if it is an especially clever root crop specimen that can tell time?
Wrist watches enjoyed only a brief popularity. They were considered a sissy thing until the First World War, when manly men busy with rifles and bombs and geometrical tables for cannons needed quick access to a timepiece for properly scheduling the deaths of other men.
A hundred years later, and the wristwatch is mostly a historical curiosity, rather like London’s Big Ben. Most everyone checks the time by pulling from their pockets an electric telescreen which is bulkier and more to difficult to access than a pocket watch, but, hey, progress, right?
Still, time is fascinating, both in its measurement and in the abstract. We read that if we travel in space time alters, and that the accurate watches and clocks on a spaceship will, upon returning to earth, show a different time.
Whether or not space-time is fluid, it appears as a plot device in episodes of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, and of course in Charlton Heston’s classic movie Planet of the Congressional Subcommittees: “Darn you! Darn you to Newark International Airport!”
My personal quest for a watch battery ended in despair, but a nice man manipulated a large brown delivery truck through one-dimensional space and with a fresh battery brought time back to my old eight-dollar Timex.
It’s about time.
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