“I shall be most put out if you don’t get up soon!”
Cabbage rattled on, letting out a loud moan that sounded distinctly cat-like.
“That’s it! I can’t take this anymore.”
Reality, it seemed, would not leave me alone. I gathered what energy I had and jumped out of bed.
“Oh, and just to check, you do remember, don’t you?”
Aloha thrust his face close to mine as he spoke.
“What? What do you mean?”
“What I’m erasing today, of course!”
I had no memory at all of what that was supposed to be. What had he made disappear? What was next on the list? Looking around the room I saw no change.
“Sorry, I don’t remember. What was it?”
“Honestly, what am I going to do with you… It’s clocks, man. Clocks.”
“Clocks?”
“That’s right. Today you erased clocks.”
Ah, now I remember. I made clocks disappear.
If clocks disappeared from the world…
Would the world change? I thought about it for a while.
The first thing I thought of was my father. I could see him in my mind’s eye, hunched over, working in his shop. You see, my father ran a small clock shop.
The ground floor of the house I grew up in was my father’s shop. Whenever I went downstairs I would see my father bent over his workbench in the semi-darkness, the desk lamp shining over where he worked, repairing clocks.
I hadn’t seen my father in four years. He was probably still repairing clocks in that small shop, tucked away in a corner of that small town.
If clocks were to disappear from the world, there would be no more need for clock-repair shops. No need for that little shop, nor my father’s skills. When I thought of it that way I started to feel pretty guilty.
But had clocks really disappeared from the world? It seemed hard to believe that they could all disappear so suddenly. I looked around the room. My wristwatch was definitely gone. And the small alarm clock I had in my room was nowhere to be found. Maybe it was like when phones disappeared—maybe I’d simply stopped seeing them, but whatever had happened, practically speaking, clocks had disappeared from the world.
Then I realized—without clocks, how would I have any sense of time? It looked and felt like morning. And since I had overslept a bit I figured it was probably around 11am. But even when I turned on the TV the time didn’t show up on the screen as it usually did, and of course phones had already disappeared, so I couldn’t rely on that. If I was being honest, I had no idea what time it was.
And yet I didn’t really feel any difference. Why was that? This was different from when I’d made the other things disappear. Other than a few pangs of guilt when I thought of my father, I felt no pain, no sense of loss. But this should have had a pretty huge impact on the world. Clocks make the world go round.
Schools and businesses, public transport, the stock market, and all other public services must be in chaos.
But for someone like me, on my own here (well, plus one cat), there wasn’t really much of a difference. It seemed like we were getting along just fine going about our normal lives without clocks, or much of an exact sense of time at all. It didn’t really make any difference.
“So why are there clocks in the first place?”
I thought Aloha might know.
“That’s a good question. But even before clocks were invented, it was only humans that had a sense of time.”
“Huh? I don’t get it.”
Seeing I was puzzled, Aloha went on.
“OK, stay with me. You see, time, or that thing we call time, is simply produced by arbitrarily determined rules. Rules that human beings made up. I’m not saying that the cycle of the sun rising and setting doesn’t exist as a natural phenomenon—because obviously it does—but it’s humans who have imposed an organizing system on that process and called it time, giving names and numbers to different parts of the day like, say, six o’clock, twelve o’clock, midnight and so on.”
“Oooh, riiight…”
“So, human beings may think that they’re looking at the world as it is, but they’ve got it all wrong. In actual fact, they’ve just imposed a meaning on things, come up with a definition of what the world is all about which happens to suit them. And I just thought it might be interesting for people to see what the world would be like without that system of telling the time, which humans just made up for their own convenience. You know, just to mix it up a bit…”
“Oh, so just like that, huh? Just because you were in the mood?”
“Yeah, well, that’s what this is all about, right? So listen, have a great day! Oh, right, there’s no such thing as a day anymore!”
And then, Aloha disappeared—his glib parting words still hanging in the air.
The story of the last one hundred years could probably be made to fit onto one page of a history book. Or maybe only a line would do.
When I found out that I didn’t have much time left, I decided I’d try thinking of an hour not just as sixty minutes, but 3,600 seconds, just to make myself feel better. But since clocks had now disappeared, counting seconds didn’t mean anything anymore.
Even the meaning of words like “today” or “Sunday” had become dubious. But after Wednesday comes Thursday, and since I knew it was morning, that meant that today must be Thursday. Which is not to forget that these days are only arbitrary human inventions…
But anyway, I didn’t have anything in particular to do, so I thought I’d just kill some time. Although there was no time to kill. And even if I decided to waste time, there was no time to waste either. This really left me with very little to go on.
How many minutes had passed since I woke up? I’d usually glance at the alarm clock by my bed when I woke up, but now there were no clocks. A world without clocks. I was being pulled along in the endless undercurrent of time. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel myself being dragged out to who knows where. After a while, it felt as if I was being drawn back into the past.
When you think about it, people sleep, wake up, work, and eat according to the established set of rules we call time. In other words, we set our lives by the clock. Human beings went to the trouble of inventing rules that imposed limits on their lives, boxing them up into hours, days, and years. And then they invented clocks to make time’s rule over us even more precise.
And the fact that there are rules means that we’ve given up some of our freedom. And yet humans have put reminders of that loss of freedom everywhere—hanging clocks on walls, dotting them around their houses. But as if that weren’t enough, they make sure there’s a clock wherever they go, whatever they’re doing, by going so far as to wrap them around their wrists. Humans have even felt the need to wrap their bodies up in time.
But now I think I get it.
With freedom comes uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety.
Human beings exchanged their freedom for the sense of security that comes from living by rules and routines—despite knowing that costs them their freedom.
While I was thinking this over, Cabbage sidled up to me. Usually when Cabbage comes over and shows me any affection it’s because he wants something.
“What’s wrong, Cabbage? Are you hungry?”
That’s usually what he wants in the morning.
“No, that is not at all what I want.”
“Oh?”
I was still struggling to believe that the cat was talking back to me. Cabbage let out a deep sigh.