Time's relativity

The relativity of time hangs heavy in these hazy days of summer.

As kids, our experience tells us that the three months of summertime are about equal to all the rest of the year. We grow as much in summer as we do in all the rest of the year (sometimes more). As adults, lingering after dinner in the gentle presence of each other, we can feel how summer evenings last twice as long as twilight in winter.

It is true that for the entirety of human existence, the sun and the moon have marked time in some sort of absolute, consistent, mechanical way. One year is roughly the same length as another; one month is roughly the same as the next. Our ancients no doubt had a good idea of this constancy, reliability and predictability of time. They built sacred buildings and sacred calendars upon it.

And yet they also experienced a variability, flexibility and relativity in the texture of time that we do not have.

Our experience of time was radically changed by the Industrial Revolution - particularly by manufacturing and train travel.

When bosses built factories, they wanted their workers to show up on time, at the same time, and produce like clock-work. The first machine-operators and assembly-line workers were different from the artisans of the culture of their youth. No longer were they masters who oversaw the creation of a entire product but isolated cogs engaged in only one step of the process.

Precision, repetition and synchronization were essential to success. Personal pacing, pausing, refinement, improvisation, modification, individuality - none of that could be accommodated on the line.

Timing was critical. Clocks that registered seconds as well as minutes (compared to the hours we counted by the sun) were the timepieces that now measured the moments and determined the movements of our lives.

But it was the railroad and its need to synchronize time across vast distances that finally tamed, tackled and tailored time. It was the needs of the railroad that created time zones, repeating the hour as we traveled west every 15 degrees. And it was the railroad that coordinated the minute hands world-wide, so that no matter what zone we found ourselves in, or what the sun-time was within that zone, we were all in sync with the minutes and each other.

For the sake of modernity, time was flattened, captured in a box. Where sundials reflected celestial time, watches created earthly time. Time morphed in the last few centuries from an element of nature to an artifact of culture. There are clearly blessings in this transformation, but also losses.

But thankfully summer returns us, if ever so fleetingly, to this pre-industrial, uncaged experience of time. Time is once again determined by the sun, measured by what we do, and how we choose to name it.

Then, when the last rays of light finally slip beyond the horizon, we can declare, as we reflect upon the day that we in part made: and it was morning, and it was evening, another day.