On Time in Time

In the essay “Walking” Thoreau writes, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” I have been wondering how Thoreau knew that it was four hours a day or more that he had been out walking. Did Thoreau wear a watch? Was there a clock in his cabin at Walden Pond? Sometimes he walked with a friend: did he then possess something to measure the time? I ask this because increasingly and annoyingly. Too often I complain about time’s controls on me; by time’s pronouncements and imperatives that are delivered and sealed on the multiple devices that ironically I seem incapable of leaving unwound or uncharged, and that I yet carry about and that unfailingly measure my life in minutes and miles.

I realize that I have allowed myself to be controlled by my devices and the announcements it sends to me of its measures and critiques of my life activities. For example, I allow my smart phone to announce the time of day, and to even note what day and month it is; The phone can inform me how many hours and minutes I have slept, can awaken me at the hour I have set for waking, and put me to sleep when at the hour I set. I think that my smart phone can now measure the quality of my sleep, as if I wouldn’t be aware of that character myself! On the phone I can use the timer function to set time-limits to my naps and to correctly time my coffee preparations. The phone measures my daily steps and keeps a record how today’s walk compares to that of yesterday’s amble, to that of last month’s walking, and to even those of the previous year, and then it has the audacity to chastise me if I have not walked as much today as I did yesterday or last month or last year! The phone announces how many calories I have expended for the day, month and year, and offers me a measure of my physical effort, of what it refers to as my METS(?). The only METS of which I am familiar or about which I even care is the baseball team for which I was a fanatical fan until they won the World Series in 1969. The phone tells me how many minutes I have stood (60 minutes), how many minutes I have exercised (74 minutes), and offers an assessment of my cardio fitness, though I don’t know to what the latter refers! I have refused the phone access to my heart rate and blood pressure though I possess a blood pressure machine that also counts the beats of my heart. There is even more recorded and stored on the smart phone but I have reached the end of my patience, technological expertise and ciuriosity. Nonetheless, when I return from my every walk I religiously check the steps report because the goal I have been cautioned is 10,000 steps and 45 minutes a day, and rule-bound that I seem to be I attempt daily to achieve that mark. And now I possess an Apple Watch because I was tricked into thinking that it was free but really I am paying for the line, though what line is meant I am not certain though I believe I have certainly crossed it. A very kind flight attendant showed my what else my Apple Watch can do but I soon lost interest. And while I depend on the devices to govern my enjoyment and measures of time, my mentor Thoreau had looked to the rooster as his measure of time. “Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought.” Thoreau urges me to live in the present which is apparently all that concerns the cock in his crowing. I seem obsessed with Time and I seem to be focused on something quite apart from the present.

            Thoreau comments that we do not ride the railroad, but that it rides upon us. It is time to which he refers. The appearance of the railroad made an immediate awareness of and obedience to time essential. Trains ran on schedules and if you wanted to ride on one you had better be in the car when the train was leaving the station. Thus, one needed a watch or a well-wound clock. No cock crowing would serve. Factory work contributed to the tyranny of time as did punch cards that recorded the times for entry to and exits from the factory floor. I seem to be governed by my anxieties that causes time to be with me late and soon. I have consider that a mountain top retreat (but not Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain where everything is controlled by a strict time schedule) or a desert escape might be a means of releasing me from the imprisonment I feel regarding time, but I am afraid of being away from the grounding time’s offers and the distractions that all of my devices grant me. Thoreau writes, “It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.” Alas, I do not think I am such a free man. As for the rooster: “Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed.” As for me, I check the news too often. 

Walking, and before that running, has served me as lucky charms: every day that I walked or ran I believed I would not die. At 78 years old I am still walking and still alive, so I think this incantatory practice to be thus far effective. But now the walking seems to count only if I approach the step goal. I often manage to come close and even at times reach ten thousand steps and even more, but the walk is not free. I pay with some peace and some distance from time’s term. Thoreau writes, “I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for . . .” Thoreau, too, understands his walk as charm, but I observe how that his walk is also committed to time: he might achieve his freedom in a walk but it must be accomplished within a specific time. I find that I like to walk early and grow rust in the afternoons. 

There is a natural order to the measurement of time: the stages of the moon, the motion of the earth about the sun that defines a year, though the results of this movement vary according to geography. For example, New York experiences four regular seasons, but Costa Rica seems to enjoy only two: the rainy season and the non-rainy season. Minnesota in my experience has four irregular seasons: a long winter, a day of Spring, several months each of Summer and Fall. The tides are regular but it has been only since the invention of the time piece that this movement can be given a specificity in time.

I think à la Kant, that time is not something we enter or use but something we create though not in the sense as in “I can make time for that . . .” That suggests an already existing schedule into which a new activity can be made to fit. Time already exists in this formulation. To allow time to be defined outside of us restricts me to the prison world of the devices. I grow rusty and lose the present. I am always somewhere else and in another time. Simon and Garfunkel sing, “time, time, time, see what’s become of me,” Sandy Denny sings, “Who knows where the time goes?” Dylan sings, “time passes slowly up here in the mountains.” I am cautioned that “Time waits for no one!” In these thoughts time is external to me and we enter into it: time precedes me. But to ignore time is not to make it disappear as if it was something external to us. Rather, to ignore time is to live in the present: Thoreau writes of the cock’s crow: “He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is, is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time.” That is, to be ever in the present and therefore, unconcerned with time.

 

 

 

 

On The Shoemaker and the Elves

For reasons not immediately relevant here, I having been thinking abut the Grimm’s tale “The Shoemaker and the Elves” though I don’t recall where I first learned it. In that story a poor shoemaker laid out the leather for a pair of shoes that he intends to work on in the morning. These were his last pieces of leather and he is so poor that he will not have the means to buy any more leather to make shoes. But when he awoke the next morning and after having eaten his meagre breakfast, he moved to his worktable to begin sewing what seemed to be his final pair of shoes, but to his amazement the shoemaker found that the shoes had already been beautifully finished. He put the shoes in the window of his shop, and soon a wealthy man came into the shop, saw the newly fashioned shoes and thinking them beautiful, and offered for them more money than the shoemaker would ever have thought to charge. With the money he had received the shoemaker purchased leather for another pair of shoes. During the day he cut the leather and laid the leather pieces out on the table expecting to begin work in the morning, but when he awoke in the morning, and having eaten his meagre breakfast prepared by his wife, he moved quickly to his worktable only to again discover a pair of shoes beautifully made. He again placed the shoes in the window and another wealthy man saw them in the window and was so enamored of the pair that, he offered far more money for than them. than the shoemaker would normally have charged for them.

The shoemaker’s reputation grew. Each night he would cut the leather out at night and then retire to bed, and early the next morning when he was about to set to work he found that the shoes had been already made. For a number of nights this continued: the shoemaker would cut the leather for the sewing in the morning, but over night the shoes were beautifully prepared. The shoemaker did not wonder how these shoes were prepared; he only knew that they were beautifully constructed and that he would be offered more money for each pair than he would have have charged for his own work.. But one evening after the man had been cutting out the leather for more shoes, he said to his wife before going to bed, "What do you think if we were to stay up to-night to see who it is that lends us this helping hand?" After dark and at bedtime, the wife lit a candle, and then they hid themselves in a corner of the room behind some clothes which were hanging up there to dry and they watched. At midnight, two handsome little naked men came, sat down at the shoemaker's table, took all the leathers which the shoemaker had cut out for next day’s shoes, and began to stitch, and sew, and hammer so skillfully and so quickly with their little fingers that the shoemaker could not turn away his eyes in amazement. The elves did not stop until all was done, and when they were finished they stood the completed shoes on the table and ran quickly out of the door. For several nights the shoemaker and his wife spied on the elves at work and the next day put the shoes in the window where they were quickly sold. The shoemaker and his wife were no longer poor. One day the shoemaker’s wife said that she thought that it would be kind of her to make clothes for the naked elves and for him to make for them tiny boots. Her husband agreed, and so one night she laid out what they had prepared and before they began work the elves donned the apparel, then prepared the shoes and danced happily out of the workshop fully adorned. And then they never returned. But the man’s shoes had now become so popular that he had more customers than he ever before, and he and his wife became rich.

So what would I say the elves were doing there in the shoemaker’s studio while he and his wife were asleep. How did they find their way into the workshop? And why? I don’t believe that the elves sought to teach the shoemaker his craft, he was asleep while they worked. And besides, he had been making shoes for years. Perhaps the shoemaker might have seen in the quality of the elves’ work techniques the shoemaker could employ to enhance his product’s excellence. Maybe the shoemaker had studied the exceptional quality in the construction sewn into the shoes by the elves and he marveled at a technique with which he was not already familiar but certainly which he could adopt in his practice. I did wonder what the shoemaker imagine was occurring in his workshop every night while he and his wife slept? He was certainly aware that somehow his leather was being crafted into fine shoes ready for sale. Why did he wait so long to find out what occurred in his workshop while he slept that left beautiful crafter shoes. Finally, one day he suggested to his wife that perhaps they hide themselves to see what was happening in the workshop while they slept. And so that night the two lit a candle and hid behind a curtain and waited. They were soon surprised to discover two naked elves dance in and set to work making shoes from the leather the shoemaking had cut and left out on the table. His wife suggested that they make clothes and shoes for the elves who had been so helpful to them, and the man agreed that this would be a wonderful act. Maybe the elves meant in their work to teach the couple the importance of generosity and kindness because once the man and woman made the elves shoes and clothes they never returned.

Now, after the elves had left the shoemaker continued to make and sell shoes. But I wondered why the rich men hadn’t entered his establishment before, paying a greater sum for the shoes than he asked. Was the shoemaker undervaluing his work or was his work not excellent? I wondered how had he and his wife survived prior to the arrival of the elves? Why did the elves need to teach him kindness and generosity. And then I pondered, why him, why did the elves appear to this shoemaker at this time? There must have been other poor shoemakers who might have benefitted from the work of the elves. 

Now, to answer these questions would be the work of midrash, the Jewish scholarly practice of asking questions in the text’s openings and then telling stories with pop and scoop to answer those questions., Out of those stories principles of ethics and manners come to be derived. Midrash is fun. And I suspect there is no end to the answers to the questions a work of art might inspire. Midrash is how stories occur: answering question from the gaps.