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If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads.

The clock, for all its precision in measurement, is a blunt instrument for the psyche and for society. Schedules can replace sensitivity to the mood of a moment, clock time can ride roughshod over the emotions of individuals.

I'll just tell you the way it is. You ask me what time it is and I'm gonna tell you how to build a clock.

There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.

The railroads needed standardized time; as a result, the technology of train travel shaped the way everyone gets up, eats, goes to sleep, calculates age, and, perhaps of no small importance, imagine the world as a whole, ticking reliably, with reliable deviations, according to the beat of one central clock in a physical location.

Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.

They took away time, and they gave us the clock.

Time has always been used against us on a certain level. The invention of the clock made us accountable to the employer, gave us a standard measure and stopwatch management, and it also led to the requirement of interest-bearing currency to grow over time, the requirement of the expansion of our economy.

Having designed and built several clocks during my career it suddenly occurred to me that when you look at the face of a clock both hands have the same center.

The technology of the time dictated the way things looked.