Time measures
Nothing but itself.
—W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water

The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks.
—Jill Lepore, How the week organizes and tyrannizes our lives

I do not plan to start anew
in January
that is for spring
—David Gate, @davidgatepoet

. . .

Daylight Savings is my Christmas morning. The day on the calendar I look forward to with anticipatory glee. The most wonderful time of the year. Just as the shortness of winter’s days (lengthening though they may be) becomes insufferable, and evidence of spring is tauntingly everywhere, this brilliant thing happens. Literally overnight, the day is longer. 

For me, a weight lifts. But for others, despite the fact that we all “lose track of time” on a regular basis (muttering things like “2:00 already?!” and “Where does the time go?”), the loss of that lone hour upon “springing forward” is experienced as a bodily misalignment, and there is a documented increase of strokes and other health risks in the 48 hours after the time change. That we can be so bad at tracking time with our bodies and senses throughout the year, and also so impacted by the time change is a modern mystery. But then again, time is a bit of a mystery: one of those seemingly unquestionable things that, the more you think about it, the more questionable it becomes. 

What is time? Why are we so ruled by it, so attached to measuring it? And can it really be lost?!

. . .

There was a piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker a few years ago called How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives, in which she discusses the history of “the week” — a concept not only man-made but changeable! — and it will twist your mind into a pretzel trying to imagine how the world would function without the construct of weeks, so fundamental are they to 21st-century life. If we only minded days (marked by the rising and setting of the sun) and years (by the repetition of seasons) how would anyone know when it was the right day to do recurring things involving other people, like attend a church service, or watch a broadcast TV show, or play a game of sports?

Not to mention the week’s central role in how modern-day, Western calendars are typically laid out, with the grid of weeks stacked into months, which then form years. (“Months”! That imperfect tool for trying to align the calendar, the year and the moon’s cycles.) But nothing about calendar time is set in stone. To this day, cultures around the world mark different start dates for a new year, and even in Christian Europe, as Jason Farago notes in his exquisite 2023 art-essay Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar, “for many centuries … the new year didn’t start on Jan 1. It began on March 25.” Spring was a fresh start in even more ways than it is today. Plus not all modern-day calendars across the globe have the same number of days or months from one year to the next, or dates that repeat or are fixed in any sense, like ours are.

Farago’s piece includes a look at many calendars from different places and eras, but it is primarily a deep dive — both funny and fascinating, a lesson in seeing — into a stunning hand-painted early-15th-century calendar, the private datebook of a wealthy French duke, known as the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. I really urge you to click through and enjoy the ride he takes you on, but what struck me most (which I’ve been chewing on in the year since I first saw it) is the discussion of time being cyclical on the left-hand pages of the duke’s datebook, and linear on the right. “We perceive time only through change,” Farago writes (and those of you who know my past struggle living in seasonally monotonous places will understand how vigorously I nodded my head). “But what kind of change? Do our lives evolve in history or do they repeat themselves? Is time an arrow or a wheel?” 

I was, at that moment, in the middle of recording both — in two separate journals.

THE CIRCULAR

In mid-2020, quarantined at home with my husband in Nashville, having closed down my business, and in the midst of that perilous election year, I saw a mention of someone’s 5-year journal and it seemed like a good idea at that particular moment in history. So I ordered one from Letts. I kept it simple: Each day I recorded what we ate for dinner (thinking it would give ideas to future me), noted the temperature (for year-over-year comparison), and added a sentence or two about the day’s events. Similar to the duke’s perpetual calendar, with a 5-year journal you start back at the beginning every January, so by the time Farago’s piece came along in April 2023 I was on my fourth pass through the book, entries stacking up on top of each other. Each day was not only itself but its past selves, remaining present. 

Sept 30 — as the random example it fell open to — was the day that one side of our tiny NY galley kitchen was completed (2023); that we flew to TX for my grandma’s funeral (’22); picked up dear friends who came to visit us in FL “post-Covid” (’21); and that I finished emptying out my old business studio space in TN (’20). Others ranged from mundane to amusing to aggravating all over again.

Like the calendars that fill store shelves every year in our world, the duke’s 1410 calendar contains 12 monthly spreads, each with a calendar opposite a pretty picture. His pretty pictures (intricately handpainted by a trio of Flemish brothers, and topped with a half-circle of cyclical time) depict how central the seasons — and more specifically the management of land and crops — are to the wheel of his trés riche life. Up until my parents’ generation, my people were middle American farmers. Every March, my ancestors prepared to sow and harvest. In the years contained in my 5-year journal, every March I packed or unpacked our belongings.

THE LINEAR

My second journal, kept simultaneously, was the version of a DIY datebook I’ve developed for myself over years and iterations. In late 2020, I settled on the form I’ve been using ever since. People familiar with the bullet journaling community would call it a “bujo,” despite that the only thing it has in common with Ryder Carroll’s inspiring Bullet Journal method is the linear 1-31 date list — which, as the duke’s book shows us, is a tradition as old as calendar-making. I couldn’t help but feel an affinity with this handmade datebook from 1410, as extraordinarily different as it is from mine, and wonder what of its features I might be able to incorporate. Farago compares it to an almanac; mine does track the weather.

. . .

Time is not only how we experience the world, it’s also how we describe it. Halfway through writing this, I became aware of time-based language piling up in the sentences, completely unintentionally: time as metaphor (“my Christmas morning”), as compulsory citation (a piece published “a few years ago“), as a point of comparative reference (“21st-century” life) or indicator of current relevancy (“modern-day” calendars) and as common parlance (“to this day”). Would we be able to tell each other stories without the components of time to lean on? But also why do we lean on it so hard?

On January first of this year, when it was time to start a new #bujo for myself and also turn again to the first page of the 5-year journal, I decided to let the latter go. Living in the present means letting the past be in the past, for better or worse. Whether like a wheel or an arrow, time moves forward, and I have my book of days to keep me on course.

[ IMAGE: Photo of DIY datebook and journal © Karen Templer ]