This is the time—and this is the record of the time
—Laurie Anderson
I always thought that the distinction between map and territory was different than the distinction between time and clock. The map is separate. It’s a piece of paper with a smooth texture and a different scale, or it’s a screen—also smoother than what it represents, with a scale its own. When you look from map to world, your eyes rise and fall: that creek might be this creek and if you do it again, that creek is still this creek, unless you’re a Zen Buddhist and the river is never the same river twice.
But you do a plank for 60 seconds, glance over at the time on the iPhone, and all you see is the moment pass by. The timekeeper keeps time by changing with the time. There’s no scale. There’s no compass.
The distance between St. Louis and New Pollock, North Dakota feels the same, whether we measure it in miles or kilometers. But believe it or not—you might challenge me on this, but I know it’s true—we measure time differently when we ride a bike as opposed to driving a car, and because we measure it differently, we experience it differently.
In this essay, Keats asks us to imagine time passing from the point of view of a tree, or a migratory bird who times its arrival to coincide with the arrival of insects at that certain place, which, in turn, times its pupation with the availability of food.
Migratory birds must coordinate their yearly flights based on the expected availability of nutrients along routes that are thousands of miles long. The insects they devour must coordinate the end of their pupation to coincide with the budding of plants they eat. The needs of different species are different but codependent. And all of these processes take time, meaning that decisions must be made without direct knowledge of what other creatures have decided.If we didn’t have watches with second-hands (or digital watches with second-counters), time would move differently for us. If we depended on the sun to mark the time of day, our time-of-day would feel different. If we didn’t have days of the week, we would experience the passing of one day to the next differently.
Jonathon Keats is involved with an organization that tries to stretch our sense of time by thinking creatively about how we keep time. It’s called the Long Now Foundation. Their most famous invention is the 10,000 year clock. Thinking about time that way is a lot like looking up at the stars or the northern lights. It makes you and your time feel small in the scale of the universe. I can’t escape the appeal of that, especially in this moment, watching the world slip into fascism here and elsewhere. The 10,000 year perspective is morally suspect, because it allows us the luxury of leapfrogging the genocides. But if we don’t let it sweep us under, I think it’s good to reconfigure timekeeping in our lives, or at least imagine what it might be like to do so.
Instead of marking time with clocks and calendars, what if we marked time by the changes in the environment as we travel from place to place?
I noticed that people stopped laughing at my stupid jokes when I left Tennessee and entered Kentucky. It’s not that the people of Kentucky don’t have a sense of humor. They just didn’t have my sense of humor. Can you keep time with people’s sense of humor as you move from state to state?
Why not mark time in the movement from river to farm to river again, or rural to city, or long, gentle rains that last all day, to short torrential thunderstorms that pass quickly, or four-lane roads followed by back roads more narrow than some people’s driveways?
We chunk time, slice it into eras and epochs—and how we chunk time changes how we live in the world. The other day I read an opinion piece that analyzed the George Floyd moment. The eight minutes forty-five seconds of the murder. The protests in the streets across the country. Trump’s reaction. I’m ashamed to admit this, but it startled me to see that moment pulled out of time that way, as in the past. I knew all of the incidents that the article mentioned— incidents that marked the start, middle and end of that moment, but to me the moment hasn’t passed. To me we’re still in the George Floyd moment. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older. I just chunk time differently.
I had to memorize a lot of dates in high school history classes. The teacher lectured, wrote down the dates on the chalkboard. The student copied them into a notebook. The test was on Friday. Over the years, there have been lots of arguments about whether that is the best way to teach history. I wonder if high school history students still memorize dates today. I hope there’s less of that, and more critical thinking.
How do you teach the passage of time? I don’t know what changed between 1765 when the skirmishes between New York and New Jersey ended and 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was signed. A contested border between New York and New Jersey had been settled after 64 years of skirmishes. Alliances that had formed in opposition to each other were dissolved, it must be, and, maybe, new alliances formed between former adversaries. If so, what role did the passage of time play? Did eleven years feel like a long time to them?
William Wordsworth was writing The Prelude while Lewis and Clark clawed their way, north up the Missouri River, wintering in North Dakota, then clawing their way west, to Great Falls, then the Three Forks, and the starvation trek over the Bitterroot Mountains, on to Seaside, Oregon.
I have a paperback copy of the four versions of Wordsworth’s Preludes: 1798, 1799, 1805, and 1850. Wordsworth died in 1850, and never saw the poem published. Those dates startled me when I first noticed them on the cover of the book in 2018. I had never pinned down Wordsworth’s time. I was getting ready for my first ride on the Lewis and Clark route, and for some reason it haunted me that Wordsworth was writing at the same time that Lewis and Clark were on their journey.
The earth is all before me. With a heart Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, I look about; and should the guide I choose Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!
— The Prelude, 1805 version
The hills and river Cliffs which we passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance. The bluffs of the river rise to the height of from 2 to 300 feet and in most places nearly perpendicular; they are formed of remarkable white sandstone which is sufficiently soft to give way readily to the impression of water; …The water in the course of time in descending from those hills and plains on either side of the river has trickled down the soft sand cliffs and worn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little imagination and an oblique view, at a distance are made to represent elegant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary; ….
— Meriwether Lewis, May 31, 1805 (spelling standardized)
I’m embarrassed that this was such an epiphany for me in 2018 when I was 60 years old. Why hadn’t I placed Wordsworth and Lewis together before that? I guess it’s because the English Literature class where I learned about Wordsworth was in a different classroom and different building and different time than the American History class where I learned about Lewis and Clark. But the realization tinted my ride. I can follow the Lewis and Clark route to the best of my ability on a bicycle, but I could never reenact that route. It’s closer to the truth to say that I was reenacting William Wordsworth’s more stately and comfortable outing.
Well. If William Wordsworth had a credit card, that is.
Among my favorite parts of this: “Can you keep time with people’s sense of humor as you move from state to state?”