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Timekeepers. Simon Garfield
Читать онлайн.Название Timekeepers
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isbn 9781782113201
Автор произведения Simon Garfield
Издательство Ingram
I thought about the man who had turned me on to books and words, a school English teacher named John Couper. Mr Couper let me bring the lyrics of Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ into our A-level seminar and analyse it like it was a Shelley poem, even though it was obviously much better. One day, Couper had stood up at the podium in our Great Hall during morning assembly and delivered a speech about time. I think he began with some famous time quotes: ‘Time spent laughing is time spent with the Gods’ (anonymous); ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life’ (Socrates). He then read from a list, and I remember it like this: ‘Time. You can spend it, make it, lose it, save it, squander it, slow it down, speed it up, beat it, keep it, master it, spare it, kill it.’ There were other dainty uses too, but his big final message was that we were privileged to be young and have time on our side, for time waits for no man (it was an all-boys school then) and that whatever else we did with our time, we shouldn’t waste it. That stuck with me, but it was a hard rule to live by.
Sometimes I think I can measure out my childhood with images of timekeeping. Perhaps we all can. One day when I was three or four my father brought home a gold carriage clock in a case lined with crimson crushed velvet, and when my tiny finger pressed the button at the top a bell chimed the hours. The school clock in the Great Hall, the kitchen clock, and in my bedroom I had an alarm clock called Big Ben made by Westclox.1
Then one day we turned on the television to watch the Irish comedian Dave Allen. This was as risky as it got in my house: Allen was a ‘dangerous’ comedian, often outraging religious groups, drinking and smoking on air, stretching out stories well beyond bedtime. He looked a little louche, and had lost the tip of his left forefinger in what he claimed was a spooky comic accident, but we found out later that it happened when a cog chewed it in a mill when he was six.
One night he got off his tall chair, put down his cut-glass tumbler, and started one of his stories about the peculiar way we order our lives. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘how we live by time . . . how we live by the watch, the clock. We’re brought up to the clock, we’re brought up to respect the clock, admire the clock. Punctuality. We live our life to the clock.’ Allen waved his right arm around in astonishment at the craziness of it all. ‘You clock in to the clock. You clock out to the clock. You come home to the clock. You eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock . . . You do that for forty years of your life, you retire, what do they fucking give you? A clock!’
His swearing triggered lots of phone calls from viewers (there were people who were just poised by their phones when Allen was on, like contestants on a quiz show). But no one quickly forgot the joke, nor the perfect comic timing, every pause like the air in a drum solo.
Recovering, I wasted a lot of time on my iPhone. One night as I lay in bed I had an urgent need to watch films starring Bill Nighy. I dimmed the screen on my phone and feasted on YouTube, and was watching addictive flows of Richard Curtis movies and David Hare’s play Skylight, and when I was done I did something unforgivable: I paid to download About Time. It was a preposterous thing about how the men in the fictional Nighy family can travel back in time, correct the mistakes of the past – a wrong word here, a bungled meeting there – and end up happy in love. As the film critic Anthony Lane pointed out, the really smart thing to do would be to look at the day’s papers and travel back to bet on winning horses, Back to the Future-style, but, as has been clear for over a century of such fictional wanderings, time travel is seldom practised by the most astute. Obviously I wished I could have travelled back and not clicked Purchase.
But it wasn’t just his work that drew me to Nighy. I once had dinner with him and his then-wife Diana Quick, and found him to be exactly the same as he was in most of his movies and plays: the immaculate suit and heavy glasses, of course, and the impeccable debonair English manners and chivalry that makes you believe everything he says is either knowing or hilarious. What I really liked about him was that he seemed to have his life mapped out perfectly. When asked how he spent his spare time he said he watched a lot of football on television, particularly Champions League games. He was just fascinated by the Champions League. In fact, he said, he measured out his remaining time on earth by how many Champions League seasons he had left. If FC Barcelona could entertain an elegant but exhausted soul for the next 25 years with their swift passing style and a strict dressing-room edict that they were to hold the ball for no longer than seven seconds, then that would amount to a fantastic mortal span for him.
As I recovered from my accident, and my elbow healed, and I was able to hold a book again, I discerned an exploration of time in almost everything I encountered: every story, every book. And every film too: every plot was time-sensitive or time-dependent, and everything that wasn’t set in an imaginary time was history. In the newspapers and on television, little seemed to be worth covering unless it was linked to an anniversary.
And the word dominated. Every three months, the Oxford English Dictionary adds about 2,500 new and revised words and phrases to the online version of its third edition (in print, the second edition runs to 20 volumes, containing 615,000 entries). Many of the new words are slang, and many of the others derive from popular culture or digital tech. In contrast to the new words, the OED also maintains a list of the old words we use most often, and they are words we might expect: the, be, to, of and, of course, and. But what are the most commonly used nouns? Month is at number 40. Life is number 9. Day is 5, and Year is 3. Person is at number 2, while the most commonly used noun in the English language is time.2
The OED observes that our lexicon relies on time not merely as a single word, but as a philosophy: more actions and phrases depend on time than any other. On time, last time, fine time, fast time, recovery time, reading time, all-time. The list goes on for ages. It leaves us in no doubt of time’s unassailable presence in our lives. And reading just the beginning of that list might lead one to imagine we have come too far, and are travelling too fast, to reinvent time or stop it altogether. But as we shall see in the next chapter, we once had a notion that such things were both possible and desirable.
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1 Which reminded me of that joke where Big Ben talks to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and says, ‘I’ve got the time if you’ve got the inclination.’
2 Oxford University Press conducted its research online, consulting books, newspapers, magazines, blogs and Hansard.
Counter-revolutionary: the 10-hour clock finds a new admirer.
Chapter Two
How the French Messed Up the Calendar
Puffball, walnut, trout, crayfish, safflower, otter, basket of gold, truffle, sugar maple, wine press, plough, orange, teasel, cornflower, tench. At the end of January 2015, Ruth Ewan positioned the last of her 360 objects in a large bright room overlooking London’s Finchley Road and tried to turn back time. Ewan, who was born in Aberdeen in 1980, was an artist much interested in time and its radical ambitions, and this new project, entitled Back to the Fields, represented an act of historical reversal so audacious and unsettling that a casual visitor might have suspected both sorcery and lunacy.
It does look like witchcraft. The objects, placed primarily on the parquet floor, also included winter squash, skirret, marshmallow, black salsify, a bread basket and a watering can. Some of the fresh produce ruined easily in the indoor conditions, and so there were occasional gaps in the display. Grapes, for instance, rotted fast, and