Table Talk
SEVERAL YEARS ago, when I was working at the British Museum, I made it a habit, if I had an extra scrap of time at the end of my lunch break, to exit the canteen into the Roman gallery, with its mum Etruscan funerary statues and cineraria, and turn right until I reached a pair of long rooms known as the horological galleries. Here, arrayed along the walls, was every manner of time-keeping device: water clocks, pendulum clocks, clocks that operated by means of a clever spring, ingenious French “mystery clocks” that hid their mechanism in a golden statue of a nymph with arm outstretched. Then, of course, there were the modern devices, sleek, steel-bodied machines operating with atomic precision. If one happened to stand in this room when the hour struck, one would be treated to an off-key symphony of chimes separated in their creation by centuries and continents but all keeping rhythm with the same heartbeat. Walking down the length of the galleries, I would often be left with the impression that I had walked into a Dutch vanitas painting.
These visits to the horological collections recur to me as I walk aimlessly through the streets of York, killing time before the beginning of a city tour. Prior to the creation of clocks—or their common use, at any rate—the pace of life would have been calibrated to allow for a certain measure of temporal inexactitude, an angel’s share of time meted out over the course of one’s existence. One can only imagine the pace of these distant days, the way the hours must have spooled out undifferentiated during the sunlit summer afternoons and contracted sharply with the coming of winter. But with the advent of pocket watches and the grinding industrial workday, which carved up our days like sides of roasted meat, such a way of being was not only replaced, but rendered so foreign as to be nearly unimaginable. As I walk through York, I am never conscious of the time at which I am supposed to meet the tour guide at the gates of the city’s art gallery, of the time printed on my return ticket to London, of the time by which I will likely make it home.
