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Absence | Nov 01 2002

One morning he stopped keeping track of time. Or he didn’t actually stop (can one even imagine such a thing?), but merely disabled all the clocks in his apartment. There were three in all: his alarm clock, the clock over the refrigerator, and the clock function in his computer. To disable the alarm clock, he removed the battery, keeping the clock facedown as he did so to avoid seeing the time. The kitchen clock proved more difficult as he had to figure out a way to get it down from the wall without noting the position of its hands. He managed this by squinting up at the clock to fix its location, then reaching up, head averted, and lifting it from its nail. The computer clock was harder still, for by default the time appears in plain view in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. How do you change something like that without seeing the time in the process? What he did was this: He held his right hand over the time and moused with his left. After changing what appeared to be the appropriate control panel setting, he restarted the computer to make certain it had taken. Sadly it hadn’t, and it was at this point that he saw the time for the first time that day: 9:59 a.m. Some time earlier he called a friend and left a message for her. “It’s Friday morning,” he said, and as he was about to add the time, he remembered that he didn’t know it. Later (was it an hour later? two hours?) he ate a peanut butter and banana sandwich (he knew it was before his usual lunch time, but he was hungry). Then he biked around town, doing errands. A few blocks from the library he saw a big clock on a black pole in front of a shoe store. He tried to not notice the position of the hands, but it was too late. 2:05.

Just as he returned to his apartment, his friend called back. He told her what he had done, and she offered to come to his place that night instead of meeting in a restaurant somewhere, since he would be unable to commit to a specific meeting time. Naturally they got into a conversation about time—the very thing he didn’t want to think about! This frustrated him until he realized that the absence of something will at first make one more, not less, conscious of it.