If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads. Prior to the institutionalization of standard time, clocks were set using local meridians or local mean time, and they varied widely. By setting all clocks with standardized deviations from a central meridian, such as Greenwich Mean Time — in 1855 in Britain, in 1883 in the United States — train schedules could make sense nationally; eventually, plane schedules could make sense internationally, as well, and so on. The railroads needed standardized time; as a result, the technology of train travel shaped the way everyone gets up, eats, goes to sleep, calculates age, and, perhaps of no small importance, imagines the world as a whole, ticking reliably, with reliable deviations, according to the beat of one central clock in a physical location. One earth, one metronome. Or, as a character in Maud Casey’s novel “The Man Who Walked Away” put it, “The universal day was established, like the slicing of a pie.”
Stacey d'Erasmo
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