(The Nationalist, 2 May 2003)
Sometimes people say that the train was the symbol of the Industrial Revolution. Would it not be more accurate to assign that role to the clock? In pre-industrial societies, time was measured differently. People remembered years by events: the year of the flood or the hiker; the month of planting, or harvest, or full moon. The time of day was measured by where the sun was at any given time, or by some common local activity. Midday, for instance, in Irish was idir eatartha, between the two (milkings, morning and evening). Shorter periods of time were measured by how long it would take to say an Our Father, and seconds by heart-beats.
Along came industrialization, and all that was swept away. We became concerned with speeding things up and saving time. We bought watches; they now measure time, not just in hours and minutes, but even in tenths of a second. We acquired a multitude of time-saving gadgets in our homes and work-places.
How does anyone save time? We cannot save it like we save money in a bank, to be drawn on at a later date, although we talk about it as if we can. What would we do with the time saved? I’m not sure we have really worked that out, so maybe it is significant that it is our age which has invented the expression “killing” time. Is it not remarkable that, with more time-saving gadgets and systems (such as plane travel), we seem to have less leisure time, less time to converse, to stand and stare. Sunday, which used to be a day of rest, has become for many people just another work day, and, even for those who don’t work, it is often filled with activity that is far from restful. Consider the singularly misnamed “leisure centres”, those places of frantic, frenetic and fanatic activities which leave people tired and ready for nothing but to flop.
I think our preoccupation with saving time has had unanticipated results. Its most obvious effect has been to increase stress while trivializing relationships. The car was developed to give us flexibility and independence in transport, and to save time. It has given us traffic gridlock, anger, and death on the roads. Visitors to Ireland increasingly describe us as impersonal, unwilling to converse, rude and aggressive.
Humans are not, and never were, the masters of time. It is our partner, not our servant.