Only One Sundial Will Go "Tick-Tock"
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published in February 18, 1983
5/27/2016
Time is a matter to which I have paid little attention all my life. In this attitude I find full support from those noble aborigines, the American Indians, who wondered that a white man should have to look at his watch to discover whether he was hungry.
In my childhood, time was a sort of punishment contrived by adults to be imposed upon children. It was always time to get up or time to have a bath or time to eat breakfast or time to go to school or time to do my homework. All the times imposed upon me as a child were harsh interruptions of my own pleasure.
Nonetheless, I have to admit that instruments for measuring time have always been a source of great joy to me.
They are fascinating toys, and I recall with delight to this day, the occasion when my father took out his large pocket watch and pressed it to my ear when I, for the first time, heard its delicate, precise “tick, tick, tick.”
I don’t think that any passage of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Schoenberg, or any other composer of stature has ever given me greater pleasure than the neat “tick, tick, tick” of my father’s watch.
When I was given my first alarm clock, I confess that I did not use it to tell time, but to listen to its pleasant, unhurried ticking. When, later, I bought a watch of my own, I bought it as a toy, and since then in selecting a timepiece have always bought the one with the loudest tick, which often proved to be the cheapest available in the store.
Alas, in this as in many other matters, I found that my taste ran counter to that of humanity at large. For most watches these days have no tick at all. Digital watches I abominate, for they make me very uneasy. They have no sense of time past or of time to come.
Mercilessly they announce the precise minute and second, leaving one isolated in the terrifying, exact, present. This produces in me an isolation as piercing as death, for the faces of the historic watch or clock present you with the comfort of a full 12 hours, uniting you with those which have passed and giving you a sense of anticipation about those yet to come. Time rightly viewed is a comforting continuum, a river flowing from the past into the future. The digital watch strips away all this huge comfort and imperils the soul.
One of the pleasantest of gifts I received over the holidays from a friend, who has a talent for finding exotic and pleasing presents, is a sundial.
Sometime ago, I mentioned I would like to have a sundial in my garden, and she hunted the length and breadth of the land and found one for me. It is a generous dial of bronze and announces on its face, “I count only the sunny hours.” It has a gnomon, or index, which casts a shadow around the face, according to the sun’s elevation, and gives you sun time, though not down to the last minute or second, which are but trivialities in the sweep of the day.
The sundial presents a problem for me. I am not sure whether it is one of those which should be set horizontally or vertically. The figures around the dial go from one to seven on the port side and from five to 12 on the starboard. There is a gap of perhaps 35 degrees at the bottom with no figure at all, which may mean that it is constructed for the latitude in which I live.
Whether it is to be vertically or horizontally placed is something for me to research, which will give me pleasure.
If of the horizontal kind, I am tempted to sculpt a statue of the Egyptian sun god, Ra, with outstretched hands on which to place the dial. The hours, after all, are a gift of this ancient deity. If it is to be vertically set, I fancy it should be on the east-west axis, calling for the use of both compass and plumb bob.
In any case, I am delighted with the gift and look forward to many times consulting the sundial to discover the hour according to the great god Ra. I have also decided to place behind the dial the mechanism of an old wind-up clock. The done, I shall be the possessor of the only sundial in existence which ticks.
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