I paid several hundred dollars to have the antique clock restored to working order. It was valuable, the man said. Worth the investment. It had been my grandparents’ clock, and was entrusted into my care by my mother not long before her death.
It’s a relatively small mantle clock. Wooden, inlaid with a delicate floral design now barely visible beneath its years of patina. A key winds both the time-keeping and chime works within it. It is a subtle presence. A quiet ticking punctuated with hourly muted chimes.
Today, I stopped its pendulum. I purposely silenced its sounds of passing time.
I know this used to be a custom when someone in a house died. As if the beating heart of the person had been tied directly to the clock’s ticking of the hours. And no one in my house has passed away recently – or is even sick or anything nearly that ominous.
But one recent night, I was lying in bed thinking about things in general. And I kept hearing the clock ticking away and chiming the hours. And it disturbed me that I was keeping track, somehow. I was measuring my thoughts. I was monitoring in time what should have been allowed free range. I was, hour by hour, counting off bits and pieces of my life.
It occurred to me that if there had been no audible chiming, no ticking, time would not be consciously passing. I would be simply thinking in the moment – not chime to chime, hour to hour, present to past.
One tends to have those kinds of epiphanies in the middle of the night, I suppose. And yet, the regret – or perhaps it was guilt – stayed with me the next day and the next.
Most of us can recall how, as children, before we learn to calculate time, our days and nights are nothing but perception, and seem to go on forever. Because our perception is our reality.
Animals also have no difficulty living in the “now” of their days. I envy the focus they can give to a moment of delight – a ball caught mid-air, a nap in front of the fire.
I was relatively older than most when I learned to tell time. (My family moved frequently and I somehow missed that day in school.) Sometimes, I suspect I am sorry I ever did learn how. I also suspect I’m not alone in that desire.
William Faulker once wrote: “Clocks slay time ... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
And so, for now at least, I stopped the pendulum on my old family clock. I will probably restart it again at some point. But it isn’t the clock I am halting, really. It’s more like I’m setting time free.