TIME STILL A PUZZLE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 60, 3 June 1942, Page 3

TIME STILL A PUZZLE

What time is it? I take my watch from my pocket and placing it upon the table prepare to write an article. What time is it? In this instant'it dawns upon me that this question is asked aloud or to oneself more often each day than any other. Our lives hang upon the watch attached bj r a> chain to* our buttonhole or J33' a band around the wrist. Is the watch attached to us or we | to it? Is it our servant or our tyrant? In ancient times the sun was the only clock, or perhaps the sundial, but the only divisions were morning, noon, evening and night. In my father's time in Andalusia, the farm labourers normally worked from sun rise until a "span before sunset" and the "span" was not fixed by any mathematical calculation either. The first real psychological and sociological division was: people who used clocks and people who did not. First came the clocks in the church towers, Avhich regulated public and communal life; then the Avail clock intruded itself into the family life; later, the pocket watch in its gold case, which kept its face hidden except when we asked it a question. Now in the twentieth century we have the wrist watch. On the natural pulsation of the wrist, Ave have superimposed the beating of a steel machinc. We divide, re-diA r idc and suh-diA-ide our existence. What time is it? How difficult it AA'oukl be to liA'e Avithout measuring the hours and minutes! HoAveA r er, clock time docs not correspond to personal time. There are long hours and short ones. Some days arc interminable, Avhile some weeks and months fairly fly past. There arc years that flee and minutes seem eternity. Then there is vital time or "tempo," slow or accelerated according to temperament, age or race. One may live fast or slow, no matter what the clock says. Leconte de Nouy, in his recent Avork on time and life "Le Temps et la Vie," publisher in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise), makes public the results of his studies upon the time it takes a Avound to heal. The speed is directly related to the age of each person; not the chronological or official age, but the real physiological one. In general, the hcal'ng is four times as fast for a boy of ten as for a man of fifty. In childhood the cells multiply and renew the broken tissues that much faster. His bodv lives four times as fast, as measured by the inanimate clock, but to the boy, a year seems immensely long. In twelve months the child grows, changes and evolutionises so that if you have not seen him for a year the change is suprising.

But, betAveen fifty and fifty-one, there is hardly a noticeable difference "while, in this case, the year goes by like a gust of Avind. It is a paradox that time seems longer to the child Avlic the faster. Yes, time flies! It does, old-timer, and the only Avay to slow it down is to fill it Avith things accomplished, new truths, discovered, new strings added to the harp, to be born anew with each sunrise.