Early yesterday morning a whole hour of daylight was stolen from our pleasant evenings and placed when we least need it, in the unfriendly mornings, all because of the cruel and pointless institution of Daylight Saving time. When I was a kid, and before I realized the futility of it, I was a rebel against time. We had to be at school early, and early is not my favorite time of day. Why shouldn’t school start at a civilized hour, like after lunch? But nobody ever listened to common sense, then or now. The time lords had decreed that the school day must start early. But “early,” like time itself, is a relative concept, while the clock is a mindless, absolute machine that doesn’t care about common sense at all.
Most of us are rigorously trained to keep time. We turn up to the minute for invitations or appointments arranged months before, and feel compelled to apologize for even a small amount of lateness. It is a discipline learned early and reinforced often, starting with feeding times and bed times, and continuing with school hours, work hours, flight times, train schedules, and the whole great strait jacket of hours, minutes, and seconds that keeps us running anxiously from place to place, watches in hand, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland muttering “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.” The whole unsteady edifice of civilization depends on millions upon millions of people being in the right place at the right time. One late passenger can stop a plane, one lazy teacher taking an extra hour in bed can retard the intellectual progress of an entire high school class.
Other nations may have a more relaxed attitude, but in our culture we are expected to be “on time.” Punctuality is almost a religion. Tyrannical watches, clocks and cell phones count down the precious moments of our lives, and beep angrily at us when we have appointments that we might prefer to forget. Radio, of course, is a time-driven medium, and I can tell you now that I will stop talking about time obsessions in exactly one minute and twenty seconds. Domestic routines are as rigid as the army’s orders of the day, especially if you have cats who are great timekeepers.
The only place where relativity rules and time seems literally to stand still is the doctor’s waiting room, where the other patients seem almost to age almost before our eyes as we wait for our entirely imaginary appointments, which have been carefully entered into a state of the art computer system, and then forgotten.
I have heard it said, though I can’t confirm it, that some primitive people who don’t possess digital watches or cell phones can tell time by the sun, moon and stars, although this may lead to some missed appointments in cloudy weather. But many years ago when I was working summers as a tour guide in Morocco we used to take our unfortunate passengers to the edge of the Sahara to meet the mysterious “Blue Men,” the native Tuaregs, named after the indigo color of their veils and clothing who might or might not appear out of the desert. They always appeared right on time, because they all did have digital watches, and the whole encounter had been scheduled weeks in advance. Even in the empty desert, time rules.
Copyright: David Bouchier
