Time's Empire

When the British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard offered this observation on the daily life of the seminomadic Nuer people of southern Sudan in the mid1930s, he seemed to be lamenting the dear price his own culture had paid for pulling time out of nature. I imagine that after writing his considered opinion of Nuer time, based on years of experience in close contact with these remote pastoral people, Evans-Pritchard must have drawn a breath and sighed before penning his next sentence, in apparent envy: "Nuer are fortunate." Those autonomous reference points the anthropologist speaks of—the ones to which we moderns believe we are required to march in lock step—emanate from an ingenious, unforgiving machine Western culture has struggled to master since the Middle Ages. I am speaking, of course, of the mechanical clock and all the other myriad clocks within its eminent domain.

"Time rules life" is the motto of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors—a credo borne out in the formal time units that make up our calendar, as well as in the way everyday events have become organized and packaged into quantifiable bundles. Like squares on a chessboard, our formal timekeeping units— from the second to the hour to the week to the month—define the field on which we engage life’s momentous challenge. Athletic competition, the great modern metaphor for life, powerfully emphasizes how much of modern existence is controlled by the clock. Hockey has its three 20-minute periods, football its four 15-minute quarters, and basketball (at the college level), a pair of precisely timed halves.We measure our records in individual sports to the nearest hundredth, sometimes thousandth of a second, and athletes aim to break time barriers: four minutes for the mile or 10 seconds for the 100yard dash. In professional football and basketball, games often end with one team "fighting the clock," calling "time-outs" that literally bring time to a stop for the participant—though not for the unfortunate TV spectator, who is assaulted by a barrage of precisely timed commercial messages.

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