Two quotes on time

On the mechanical working of a clock

Time. That pesky dimension that simultaneously orders and confuses our whirling lives. I’ve been reflecting on rhythm and time, and so today wanted to share two interesting quotes from books I’ve read somewhat recently.

As a little context for this first quote, the Turtle Mountain women in The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich, work their days in a jewel bearing plant, “leaning into the hard light of their task lamps. The women pasted micro-thin slices of ruby… onto thin upright spindles in preparation for drilling.” This work, the factory, weaves itself through the heartbreak and depravity of the story, and provide an appropriate setting for the following sparkling reflection on time:

“If you revolve a circle around a pole, the surface of the revolution would be a torus. An inner tube. You can have a hollow torus or a solid torus, which is the torus plus the volume inside the torus, a doughnut, a jewel bearing. A metal spindle turns in a jewel-lined pivot hole. The hole is shaped like a torus, and the mechanism makes possible the ideal of frictionless eternal motion.

“You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the second, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.” — Louise Erdrich