Stand #59—-On Time
Wednesday, February 19th, 2014
“I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”
—-Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
The bell just rang, and I find myself back in time. Not that I had ever really left time, but I certainly understand what Quentin must have felt like when he was so suddenly jarred back into the ebb and flow of time. How he felt when he found himself trapped within an inexplicably claustrophobic realm of tick, tick, tick, tick…and on…and on…but the clock feels no remorse. The bell felt no remorse. It had interrupted something beautiful and something isolated, and it would never know. It would continue to be indifferent to its thousands upon thousands of interruptions each day; it would continue to beat itself on to the souls of its prisoners. And I, one of the entrapped, would find myself immediately wanting to reflect on something that had already eluded my most immediate grasp. For now the reflection would be susceptible to my memory’s many biases and my newly acquired considerations. By nature, I could not reflect without coming to terms with time and its rules.
Put simply: thought interrupted. I had drifted, quite unknowingly, into a realm that was insensitive to time’s demands. I had unwillingly traveled back to my past; I was back in college. A freshman. And if you had found me in that moment, if you had happened to travel back to the same time and the same place, you might have seen me in my most free form. For I was out of time. Completely. I was lost there for a moment, and I had no desire to be anywhere else. The words desire and regret did not exist in such a space. Only freedom and being. No room for a contemplation of our various relations to time. Only now, being back in time, can I reflect on time and the lack thereof in that moment.
And as I write, I stare at the clock in all of its finitude and authority. I know I have another commitment coming soon, and I know I regret one of my actions from earlier in the day. But back in that college dorm room, I knew of no such regret or stress. Commitment free zones exist, but we do not always know how we get there; we only know what brings us back. A snap. A tick. A bell. A loud, obnoxious, penetrating bell that leaves us wondering where our manners went. Have we never thought to rid ourselves of such intrusions permanently and forever? Let the moments fade on their own; let the conversations come to their natural point of conclusions. They exist on their own; they can cease to exist on their own as well.
There is a voice that is responding to this piece even now, as I write this line, claiming that it is possible to transcend time, and it is possible to not be a slave to the weight of the watch. Perhaps. But for today only, carry around a note pad and a pencil. On that note pad, make a mark every time you are aware of time. This includes remorse, regret, desire, hope, anticipation, memory, stress, bells…mark it. Mark every single time that time exists in all of its smug and arrogant nature; mark its interruptions and its intrusions. Mark its reminders and its remainders. And then at day’s end, stare at the piece of paper and consider the countless marks that exist on that page. Now imagine the day that that page remains empty. Completely empty. It could only happen in a world that chose to rid itself of not watches, but the weight of the watches; the weight of the bells. The bell, my friends, is a reminder. It is not a mandate. Nor is it a necessity. Leave us be until we are ready to go from one place to another. And we will be. But only if we are allowed to play out our thoughts to their respective conclusions first without being told to do so by an all too indifferent mechanical presence.
