A Day in the Light

Told the way the dial tells it: from before dawn to the middle of the night.

The Wrong Thing to Want

I had gone into the luxury watch stores the way you’re supposed to — appointment, good shoes, the whole ritual — because I was building a watch and it seemed irresponsible not to hold the competition. So I held it. Tray after tray of it.

And I felt nothing.

I kept waiting for it — the click, the small hot want that everybody describes. It never came. What came instead was arithmetic. And underneath the arithmetic, a question I couldn’t stop asking, which was:

What is this actually for?

Because I already knew what time it was. Everybody in that room already knew what time it was. We had all known what time it was continuously since 2007.

I had removed the numerals because they competed with the sky.

I had removed the minute hand because the sky does not have minutes.

I had removed the seconds hand without even thinking about it, the way you don’t think about not putting a speedometer on a sailboat.

Each of those was a small, defensible choice. Together they had produced an object that cannot answer the only question a watch is ever asked.

Clock time is an agreement.

Not a fact. An agreement. Noon on the wall is not the moment the sun is highest — it is a number a legislature assigned to a strip of the earth about a thousand miles wide, so that trains could leave on schedule and meetings could start. It is a coordination protocol. A very good one.

Solar noon is an event.

It is the moment the sun crosses your meridian. It happens whether or not anyone is watching, whether or not anyone has agreed to it.

It is not a watch that refuses to measure time. It is a watch that measures a different quantity — one that was there before there were clocks, and would still be there if every clock stopped.

A seconds hand is an accountant.

A seconds hand moves six degrees per second. You can watch it. That is its entire function — to make duration visible, to turn time into a countable thing, into units, into something you can be seen to be spending well or badly.

You cannot watch it move.

My hand moves fifteen degrees per hour. There is no angle at which you can catch it. You can only ever look down and notice that it has moved since the last time you looked, which is a completely different experience from watching a countdown.

I did not design that. It falls out of putting twenty-four hours on a circle. But it turns out to be the most important thing about the object, and it is not something I could have argued my way into.

You have to wear it.

A great deal of counting, done once.

It is the most calculated object I have ever been involved in making. And I am telling you it is about getting out of counting. Both are true, and the relationship between them is the part I find beautiful.

I did all of that arithmetic once, at a desk, over months, so that the person wearing it never has to do any. The math is not in tension with the idea. The math is what buys it.

Every hour of it was spent so that the object could be looked at rather than read.

And Then It Just Got Dark

You are outside at the end of an evening, the sky is doing its long slow thing, and then somewhere in the middle of not paying attention it is simply night. The transition never seems to have a middle. It has a beautiful part, and then it has an ending you missed.

It is not a trick of memory. It is three real things happening at once.

The light is not leaving evenly

The sun goes down at a steady rate. The light does not.

So the fastest collapse does not happen during the part everyone photographs. It happens just after, in the stretch nobody has a name for and nobody stays outside to watch.

Your eye is changing hands

At the end of dusk your eye is losing color vision at the same moment the world is losing most of its remaining light. Two curves, unrelated to one another, steepening together. That is the sensation of it suddenly being night.

The twilight world does not only get darker — it gets bluer, and part of that blue is not in the sky at all. It is in you.

The color goes before the light does

A grey sky reads as a dark sky. Your sense that “it got dark” is often a report about color rather than about brightness, delivered a few minutes early.

The dial spends its precision where the sky spends its.

The result is that a dial you glance at through an evening does the thing the evening does.

It lingers, and then it goes.

These are pages from a book.

It is called A Day in the Light, it is about the Skydial, and it is still in first draft. What you have just read are passages from it.

The first edition is twenty, made by hand.