Brain Food #870: The peculiar hour
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Decimal time
13 min read
The article directly references Julieta Aranda's clock that uses decimal time, describing it as a 'short-lived experiment' that split the day into ten hours. This fascinating historical attempt to rationalize timekeeping during the French Revolution offers rich context about humanity's efforts to systematize time measurement.
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Railway time
20 min read
The article discusses how cities like Venice and Turin once had different local times based on solar noon, and how synchronization wasn't needed until modern travel emerged. Railway time was the pivotal historical development that forced standardization of time across regions, directly relevant to the article's meditation on 'peculiar hours' and asynchronous living.
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The Hours (novel)
9 min read
Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is directly quoted in the article regarding how an hour can be 'stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length.' The novel's structure around a single day and its meditation on time's subjective nature deeply connects to the article's themes.
The end of daylight saving time, marking the close of summer, is an event that can both disturb and delight. In the autumnal switch that signals the return to standard time, our afternoons speedily sink into darkness, and the days suddenly seem shorter, even though the number of hours in each remains the same.
On the day the clocks move back, we gain an extra hour. Yet some of us may find ourselves in a kind of latent jet lag, waking up for days afterward on the ‘old time’, discovering an additional hour in the morning that wasn’t there before.
What, then, does one do with an extra hour?
The clocks always move on a Sunday because it’s the least disruptive day of the week. Many of us would have appreciated an extra hour on a working day, yet it arrives on a day that calls for rest and relaxation. One can use it as they please, but perhaps there is an added, quiet significance in receiving this hour on a Sunday, a message waiting to be deciphered. Perhaps this message is saying, ‘Do not use this extra hour for work.’
In The Hours, Michael Cunningham wrote, “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length”.
I used my extra hour last Sunday to start writing this post. I finished it in the hidden hours of the morning. The hour, of course, is an illusion. It is never gained nor lost; it simply travels back and forth every year. Clocks did not exist until the 14th century. Daylight saving time is observed in selected parts of the world, with about two-thirds of countries choosing to simply carry on as they are.
In The Order of Time, Italian physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli described how, in the past, life was not ruled by clocks, but by local rhythms:
“The usefulness of clocks supposedly resides in the fact that they tell the same time. And yet this idea is also more modern than we might imagine. For centuries, as long as travel was on horseback, on foot or in carriages, there was no reason to synchronise clocks between one place and another. There was good reason for not doing so. Midday is, by definition, when the sun is at its highest. Every city and
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