Don't Steal Our Sun / The Past Inside The Present

under this clock..., paloetic, 2010

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.
-Mark Twain

For a few years in school I refused to set my watch according to Daylight Savings. The very idea of gaining and losing an hour each year was absurd. Noon is noon - the point of day when the Sun is directly overhead. Of course this is never actually the case in most places even within a perfect time zone system, never mind the absolute mess that passes for a system in practice, but it's accurate enough for common use. If DST irritates me (and it is as I write this at 1am 2am) then you can imagine what I think of the Daylight Savings Bil 2010.

In the time zone system the gradient of local times is supplanted by a common time necessary for regional co-ordination (transportation scheduling, etc). At the very least the common time is sufficiently close to the true local time as to be imperceptible barring cross-border time-travel anomalies. Daylight savings disregards time as defined astronomically, and if you can have everyone shift their clocks an hour forward or two in the current proposal, well why stop there? If the point at which the sun rises and sets can be customarily modified under the guise of energy savings and economic activity, what basis does our observation of time actually rest on? It's now an entirely sociological construct with only a historical basis in local time.

That the parliamentary bill hasn't advocated a shift to Beijing time (GMT+8) for economic reasons is obviously because the majority of the population have no intention of working night-shifts. However, if the English tourism sector gets their wish of bringing the UK permanently to GMT+1 then I had better get fucking used to the dark. If the time on the clock is now completely arbitrary, then let England have its own zone and let me have mine. Unfortunately the current Prime Minister believes we are "a United Kingdom [and] I want us to have a united time zone." We've got one and it's bad enough, but it'll do. Though I should point out, only the home nations are within a single zone. The UK dependencies across the globe are spread across many zones.

The pressures that led to the creation of time zones will eventually reassert themselves on the current mess of zones created by political decree, particularly when it comes to cross-border interaction.

I've always hated that standard question: "Where do you see yourself in X years? / What do you see yourself doing in X years?" - I hate it because I have no answer. I just cannot imagine a year from now, and worse still I can never remember imagining now a year ago. I can only look back whilst trapped in the present. All my potential future actions are based on a continuum of present actions themselves based on a continuum of actions stretching back to my birth - and even then my own actions were set in motion by others before me and so on. To imagine the future without the knowledge of my intervening activity is to extrapolate from a situational void. It seems unnecessary to say but no-one remembers the future.

Though I seemingly have no concept of time "other than it is flying", I do have a sense of place in history. You gain a valuable sense of perspective by knowing that recorded history barely makes it past the 7000BC mark in a universe that has existed for upwards of 13 billion years. Still, the distant past seems... distant. How far is it and where is it? We describe time with the same words that we use to measure space - the words 'length' and 'linger' both arise from the same lexical root (PIE *del-). If time is the fourth dimension along which everything is moving then the past is by spatial analogy somewhere further back down the road. The past is still happening. This house still has it's original Victorian inhabitants and me and everyone in between. We are united in location and divided in time, whereas my correspondent across the Atlantic and I are divided in location and united in time.

To gain a sense of the past still happening, look at prehistoric cave paintings and read ancient graffiti. The past isn't so removed when you realise the long dead liked to chisel the names of people they shagged just as we see in public bathrooms today. Death, sex, and convenience - we've not travelled very far down the road.

[803]