If you visit Christ Church College at Oxford University, you might notice something rather strange among the fabled ‘dreaming spires’: the clocks are wrong. Or, rather, the clocks are right.
It’s not a huge difference. The clocks are just five minutes and two seconds behind Greenwich Mean Time – time as measured at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, which forms the basis of the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) used around the world. That five-minute gap exists because Oxford lies west of the Prime Meridian, the line of 0° longitude that runs through Greenwich. The further from London you go, the further ahead or behind UTC the local solar time becomes. In Cornwall, the sundial was more than a quarter of an hour behind Greenwich.
I say ‘was’, because in the 19th century everything changed. Technology transformed our relationship to space, and time was dragged along with it.
In Being and Time – that hand-grenade thrown into 20th century European philosophy – Martin Heidegger wrote that “initially, ‘time’ shows itself in the sky, that is, precisely where one finds it in the natural orientation towards it, so that ‘time’ is even identified with the sky.” For most of human history, to ask the time was to ask a question about the Sun. Indeed, such a question was probably rare, for nobody really needed to know the minute. People lived by the hours of the day and the ebb and flow of the seasons.
We still created calendars, of course, and a roster of feasts and holidays – events that unify what Charles Taylor called “high time” and “profane time”, the time of the sacred and the time of everyday work and rest. But even these were still linked to the accidents of the orbit of the planet and the positions of celestial bodies. Time was structured by rhythms and cycles that had their origins in the tilt and rotation of the Earth, rather than any more distinctively human project.
As evolved creatures, we are embodied to the effects of these cosmic accidents. The Sun is buried deep in our biology. We rise and sleep with circadian rhythms that betray our identity as animals living on a planet that turns on its axis once every twenty-four hours. On the plains of Africa, our distant ancestors could simply never move fast enough to experience jetlag; never had to forego sleep in order to communicate with anyone in a different time zone. They could outwit predators and prey alike, but they could never outrun the Sun.
But it’s different for us. New technologies changed things. It appears most people used to fall asleep for about four hours, wake for an hour or two deep in the night, and then sleep for another four. But street lighting and candles made it possible to fight the darkness for longer, so a single long period of sleep became the default. Interestingly, though, experimental data suggests that if people are kept in the dark for fourteen hours a day, the old two-part sleeping pattern seems to re-emerge.
With the coming of the factory, time was turned into a commodity, carved up and sold in increments. A new question became possible: “Do you have the time?” – a question that faintly alludes to a sense in which the speaker has lost the time, through time’s being made more precise than the sky and the body can provide.
If you visit Christ Church College at Oxford University, you might notice something rather strange among the fabled ‘dreaming spires’: the clocks are wrong. Or, rather, the clocks are right.
It’s not a huge difference. The clocks are just five minutes and two seconds behind Greenwich Mean Time – time as measured at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, which forms the basis of the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) used around the world. That five-minute gap exists because Oxford lies west of the Prime Meridian, the line of 0° longitude that runs through Greenwich. The further from London you go, the further ahead or behind UTC the local solar time becomes. In Cornwall, the sundial was more than a quarter of an hour behind Greenwich.
I say ‘was’, because in the 19th century everything changed. Technology transformed our relationship to space, and time was dragged along with it.
In Being and Time – that hand-grenade thrown into 20th century European philosophy – Martin Heidegger wrote that “initially, ‘time’ shows itself in the sky, that is, precisely where one finds it in the natural orientation towards it, so that ‘time’ is even identified with the sky.” For most of human history, to ask the time was to ask a question about the Sun. Indeed, such a question was probably rare, for nobody really needed to know the minute. People lived by the hours of the day and the ebb and flow of the seasons.
We still created calendars, of course, and a roster of feasts and holidays – events that unify what Charles Taylor called “high time” and “profane time”, the time of the sacred and the time of everyday work and rest. But even these were still linked to the accidents of the orbit of the planet and the positions of celestial bodies. Time was structured by rhythms and cycles that had their origins in the tilt and rotation of the Earth, rather than any more distinctively human project.
As evolved creatures, we are embodied to the effects of these cosmic accidents. The Sun is buried deep in our biology. We rise and sleep with circadian rhythms that betray our identity as animals living on a planet that turns on its axis once every twenty-four hours. On the plains of Africa, our distant ancestors could simply never move fast enough to experience jetlag; never had to forego sleep in order to communicate with anyone in a different time zone. They could outwit predators and prey alike, but they could never outrun the Sun.
But it’s different for us. New technologies changed things. It appears most people used to fall asleep for about four hours, wake for an hour or two deep in the night, and then sleep for another four. But street lighting and candles made it possible to fight the darkness for longer, so a single long period of sleep became the default. Interestingly, though, experimental data suggests that if people are kept in the dark for fourteen hours a day, the old two-part sleeping pattern seems to re-emerge.
With the coming of the factory, time was turned into a commodity, carved up and sold in increments. A new question became possible: “Do you have the time?” – a question that faintly alludes to a sense in which the speaker has lost the time, through time’s being made more precise than the sky and the body can provide.
It’s easy to think we should resist this shift somehow, and reclaim time as a lived experience of sky and body instead of an artificial, mathematical structuring of our days, years, and lives. Those deliberately slow clocks in Oxford are a charming little act of rebellion against the divorce of clock-time and sky-time. Our sun-programmed body, after all, has a habit of reasserting itself against clock-time, as anyone who has laid sleepless in a foreign city after a long flight can tell you. (Insomnia, said Levinas, is sheer awareness of being as such, a state of watchfulness without an object. It also, we might add, sucks). Jetlag is a reminder that we’re moving at velocities far greater than our ancestors on the plains ever could.
But instead of fighting it, some reformers suggest we should just finish what we started two centuries ago. Aviation, for instance, largely works on ‘Zulu Time’ i.e. UTC. So why not simply use one time zone for the whole world?
That would take some getting used to, of course. For the first time, ‘midday’ and ‘12pm’ would be very different things everywhere but London. Depending where you live you might be watching the dawn at 11pm or snuggling into bed at 11am. Yet we’re already used to clock-time diverging from the sky given the shorter days of winter and the long twilights of summer, and the change to daylight saving time and back. Perhaps it wouldn’t be that much of a shift.
Still, don’t be surprised if the old rhythms continue to haunt us even as our technological powers increase. No matter how fast we manage to live, we’re still creatures of the Sun.
