The Beginning of Time

In these final days of 2010, I find myself meditating on time itself. Time-keeping began in the monastery, writes Lewis Mumford. There, inside the walls of the cloister, was regularity and discipline and order — the Rule of St. Benedict, with its strict adherence to seven devotions during the day.

Regularity requires time-keeping, and by 1370 there was a well-designed modern clock. And so, says Mumford, "one is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries — at one time there were forty thousand under the Benedictine rule — helped to give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men."

As bells tolled the hours not just in monasteries but in towns and villages, time-keeping jumped the fence of the cloister and moved out into the world at large. "Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing," Mumford writes. "As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions."

So as I dash from home to the office, as I parcel the hours of my day into discrete intervals — often wishing for nothing more than time without time — I am heir to this big invention, this new way of organizing daily life. Somehow, that makes the rushing around feel a bit more noble.