4 Rooms

An English professor was always reminding us of time. He said, “When we’re in this classroom, we’re dealing with an artificial situation.” By this, he meant our use of the clock to define when to be here, and when to leave. I always pondered what a genuine, non-artificial situation was supposed to be. Perhaps all situations are artificial, whether we’re in class, driving to appointments, calling friends, or watching television. Appointments cannot be missed, minutes on phones cost money, and problems on television must be solved within an hour or half-hour. One thing did impress me: we ARE governed by time, whether artificial or not.
I was walking with a friend 3 years ago who said she would have liked to take time and put it into a jar. I thought we would be immortals, then, peering into a mortal world, escaping artificiality. I drop a green leaf into that jar and watch it die. My hand would whither with age. The sun would rise and set, all within the jar containing time. Outside that jar, we’d sit, and be immortals, Greek giants passing the jar back and forth for entertainment, watching decaying little people do decaying little things.
Now, the demands we make on each other change our conceptions of time. Today, everyone expects email responses immediately. Globalization induces instant communication—the click of a button, the ring of a cellular phone. The second grows, even as the world shrinks. Once, time really was our ally. And now, we are pushed and harried, falling into the future at the break of yet another artificial day.
Fortunately, time is forgettable. Despite our mortality, and when time occasionally spares us, we still do produce things. We daily leave our thumbprint on a rushing world filled with ticking clocks. We persist in reading and writing. Some of us avoid isolation, ignoring barriers, forcing a lively talk, in a system of taps through prison walls. We hope that the sun will occasionally pause for us. We lose ourselves in history, philosophy, and literature, exploring worlds that stand to multiple explorations. The libraries of the world invite us to forget about time for a while. We hope we may not really someday have to die, and that our growing isolation will crumble into unity when we realize that time is not time unless we feel its passing.
Nevertheless, around the world, 6 billion little clocks are ticking, roughly 80 times a minute, clocks like small homes with four rooms, a limited number of ticks, with a steadfast wind that cannot on this earth be rewound—and what a beautiful, silver alarm bell! (Caleb Sattler)