Henrietta Hay's Column

I got to thinking about clocks the other day - clocks and time and how we live our lives around them in the modern world. The sense of time must be pretty basic, however. What I like to think of as the biggest and oldest clock in the world was marking the seasons for Britons in the early Bronze Age.

When we are young we all dream of seeing far away, magic places. My dream was to see Stonehenge, and some years ago I finally stood in that magic circle on the Salisbury Plain in Britain and looked up in awe at those giant stones.

Although scientists have offered many theories about why and when and how it came to be, Stonehenge is still a mystery. Whether in fact it was built as a temple or a prehistoric astronomical observatory, my fantasy is as good as any body's, and I like to think of it as the biggest clock in the world.

Once a year, in the words of Gerald S. Hawkins, "on midsummer morning the full disc of the sun would rise over the heel stone so precisely that if I had been a Stone Age man I would have been delighted or frightened or comforted or awestruck..."

That prehistoric man would have had known, at dawn, once a year, what time it was.

Today, at a government lab in Boulder, time gets measured in atomic vibrations, 9,192,631,770 to a second.

Somewhere between those two clocks there must be something we can live with on a daily basis.

I don't have an office to go to every day, or a rigid schedule to keep. One would think that exact time would be fairly low on the priority scale. But just now I got up out of my chair and counted the clocks in my house. There are ten of them, including the one in my computer, which currently reads, "Fri 11:31 AM." The only reason that is important is that I am more or less committed to sitting here for another 29 minutes before I can get up and finish that mystery I'm reading.

What sane person could need ten clocks? Surely time is not that important. Time is relative. Einstein said so, although he figured it out from scientific research and not from modern meetings. The number of minutes in an hour of a boring meeting can approach 1000. On the other hand, if you are having fun, there are only 15 or 20. Think how many times that atomic clock would have to vibrate during a political speech.

Some of my clocks I want to keep around. The snooze alarm button is a modern necessity. The clock on the VCR is essential to intelligent TV watching (if that is not an oxymoron). The clock on the microwave oven makes meals possible for cooking-impaired people like me. The see-through clock that son John gave me for Christmas, the one which lets me watch all the gears move, is purely aesthetic and therefore valuable.

What if there were no clocks? What if you could get up when you wake up, go to work whenever you want to, skip meetings entirely, sit around at the airport hoping a plane will come by? What if there were no column deadlines and no appointments and no --horrors -- no computers? Unthinkable!

I do, however, believe that the "good life" could use a little slowing down, a little less obedience to clocks and a lot more time to relax, or even - sob - think. The clock at Stonehenge told the primitives the time at the summer solstice. The clock in Boulder measures time in nanoseconds. We moderns are in such a hurry.

T. S. Eliot made a lot more sense when he wrote, "For I have know them all already, known them all: / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

Sorry. Gotta go. It's time for lunch.