Counter Clock Wise

A long walk today, from the apartment near the Luxembourg Garden to the Jardin des Plantes to look at the animals.  The zoo is not one of Paris’s triumphs, but it was the first day in a week that it wasn’t cold, windy, and rainy, so the zoo seemed as good an excuse as any to take a walk through several quartiers of the city I don’t often see, the streets of  l’Abbé d l’epée, St. Jacques, Clovis, Cuvier, Monge.  If I learned nothing about the animal kingdom, the day and the walk taught me something about time. What happened was I noticed something missing, which is not always easy to do.  Part of Sherlock Holmes’s deductive brilliance was to notice that a dog did not bark in the night when any self-respecting dog would have.  What I noticed—and I don’t know why—was the absence of time, by which I mean nothing having to do with physics, but more an absence of concern about the time of day. In America, people are always looking at their watches (unless I am wrong and they are simply obsessed with their wrists).  People look, then change direction, set their faces, or decide to eat lunch because of what their wrists have told them.  The time consultation is a commonplace of American culture.  I imagine, if Americans suddenly stopped doing it, it would also take a while to notice, but then the result would be unsettling.  It will not happen, however, so there is no need to worry about that. I rarely if ever see Parisians studying their wrists.  Even so, by and large they tend to show up on time (more or less) if you’ve made a date and seem as well to eat at the same time day after day.  During my walk, I began to wonder how they do it.  It’s not an abundance of public clocks: quite the contrary because there are only a few left. The first public clocks appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century.  They were marvels that superimposed the discipline of the machine on human instinct, giving the exact moment to offer a prayer or blow out the candles.  Few things in history have ever made bureaucrats happier.  In the nineteenth century, the century of political and industrial revolution, clocks blossomed on public streets, some placed there by the time-loving bureaucrats in an act of amour-propre disguised as a public good, and others placed there by merchants hoping that a handsome clock would attract attention and promote business. Time was, we could say, time was important—or knowing the time.  The public mechanical clocks, many with four faces, were expensive to build and difficult to maintain.  Something as costly and balky as a big clock is not put up for no reason.  But the clocks have gone.  In the course of my walk, I saw two and later two more when I went out to visit friends. The first two clocks were near the Métro stations at Jussieu and Monge.  One other was also near the subway, at Raspail and Bac, and only the last, at a little triangle made by the Rues Vavin and Bréa, was not directly opposite the Métro.  Perhaps the subways’ masters believe riders entering or exiting are in great need to know the time, but only, evidently, at certain stations. I have also noticed that the time and temperature signs that were so popular with American banks never really caught on in Paris, at least I don’t remember seeing any, and they seem to be fading in the States as well. So: if Parisians are not looking at their watches and have no reliable public source of time-telling…  Well, I was about to ask how do they know the time of day.  But I have a better question:  Does it matter if they do? The historical superimposition of the mechanical over the instinctual has never, I believe, completely adhered to the French soul, let alone the French wrist, so I doubt the typical Parisian knows the exact time of day by checking his cell phone on the sly (though I have heard this argument).  Did the Renaissance clocks make the Matins prayers any more effective by being uttered at exactly two in the morning?  Is my e-mail today any more to the point because it was sent at 11:15:27—and if so, why do we stop at whole seconds when we could have fractions? The answer is that daily life is not a downhill ski race where hundredths of a second mean something, at least to skiers and their endorsement contracts.  There is enough instinct left here in Paris, even in the twenty-first century, to go about one’s business with the cues that have served humans ever since we began living in villages and arranging to meet—the position of the sun, especially, but also what everyone else is doing. That may be the trick of time here.  There is a common sense of it, a universal feeling that the time has come, and so people head for the café, for home, for wherever they want to be next.  And it is more interesting to consult the face or posture of a passerby than one’s own wrist.  The face is precise enough—and enough is always sufficient. © Joeseph Lestrange