A time of the priest, a time of the merchant

A time of the priest, a time of the merchant.

Somewhere, deep in the pile of scholarly articles I have in my mind — not a “mind palace,” but a “mind flatshare” where everybody comes from all walks of life and refuses to clean up — I have an explanation of why this dichotomy is important in the history of human relationships with time.

(Most likely, that dichotomy has something to do with the European medievalists, say, a French historian with a piece of writing that was inspiring, but a little too elegant to follow that inspiration bravely without an armour of academic degrees and a network of benevolent professional engagements.)

A time of the priest is organised around prayer. We can also assume that there is some sort of calendar, isn’t there? Cyclical in nature. You need to go through a certain textual canon yearly. Bells are ringing. Seasons come and go. Everything begins with a man and a woman in the garden and ends with the apocalypse, if you will. Bereshit bara elohim et hashamayim ve et haaretz.

(Due to a certain partiality towards religious imagery, mainly Abrahamic in nature, when I was younger, people tended to overestimate my level of being a practising anything. In fact, my relationship with any religion is more similar to that of a member of the public to an art gallery: one can see the beauty but not necessarily understand anything that is beyond that. And it is always best to keep some areas out of reach.)

A time of the merchant is governed by the face clock, with its quarters and granularity. Even though the hands of the clock are moving in circles, time is linear, with a clear progression from cause to effect. The clock chimes. New contracts, new riches. One would be happy to live in a world where all transactions are cyclical, but in fact, one can only pray for it.

For almost a year, I have been living right across the street from the clock on a church bell tower. A Victorian Christian edifice marks the boundaries of what used to be called “the devil’s acre,” with Gothic pointed arches adding centuries of age. From time to time, when I focus on the sounds outdoors, I hear the bell chiming the hours. I am always too absent-minded to count them. So, for me, it is more of an external rhythm: not there to be seen, heard, or otherwise perceived by me, but still there. If you ask me, I am fairly ignorant of whether there is any difference, sound-wise, between night and day, beyond the fact that at night one can hear a much further (and bigger) bell on yet another tower.

What is my time, that of the priest — or that of the merchant?