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as a harmless oddity; at worst, a heresy. Elaborate clocks brought by European visitors to the Chinese court were viewed as toys, their donors patronized as clever children. In a world governed by natural rhythms, the aberrant or the innovative is doomed to rejection and isolation, like Galileo, or poor Solomon of Caus. Why work harder? Why improve tools or work conditions? Ironplows are good enough. If it was good enough for my grandfather, it’s good enough for me. The Chinese court exercised a time monopoly, and over the centuries the culture suffered for it.
    The ultimate time theft is slavery, to be permanently on another’s time, never to rest (except by malingering), never to possess (except through charity or theft). Instructive, then, that the most creative manipulation of time in American music was the invention and the property of slaves and their descendants. In classical European music, the percussionist watches the score and waits for his entrance. The skinsman in jazz, by contrast, is in constant communication with time. He is his own Greenwich, setting the tempo, creating the score freshly with every performance. In
Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome
, the novelist and jazz scholar Stanley Crouch writes: “In jazz, the time doesn’t just pass the way it does as it’s defined on a ticking clock or a metronome; it interprets the tempo through swing, propels you, supports you and it talks to you, comments on your own activity and you talk with it.” Time talks to you, as it did to Keats peering at the Grecian urn, and to Whitman, and to van Gogh as he absorbed the lessons of Japanese woodcuts, and, much later, to Faulkner and Woolf and Proust, and as it has to nearly any serious thinker of the past century and a half. Time talked to them. Time was in the air.
    Our sense of a decent civil society depends on the rule of law, but just laws, in turn, derive from what Landes called “shared time,” the democratic apportionment of time. Wages, contracts and patents, terms of office and weighted sentences, permissions, warrants lapsing and renewing, rents, interest, schedules, penalties, bonds maturing and loans falling due—in all this, civil society recognizes the beneficial impermanence of political and economic activity. But not
total
impermanence. It seeks to preserve other institutions, and to render them time-resistant, as in the case of life appointments, of tenure, of tax-free status for churches, schools, museums, and certain kinds of foundations.Democracy recognizes individual change as part of a greater continuity; change guarantees stability. Tyrannies shelter their institutions with permanence and resist all change as a threat to their legitimacy.
    If time did not come directly from God, it came from the tsar, and later from the Communist Party. Young Cleveland Abbe, one of the major players in the standard time movement, friend and collaborator of Fleming’s, president of the American Metrological (measure-reform, not weather-forecasting) Society, and founder of the U.S. Weather Service, spent two postdoctoral years (1866–67) in Russia working under Otto Struve, director of the Pulkovo observatory near St. Petersburg. During those years, he had to instruct his mother to stop addressing her letters to him at “the National Observatory,” because, he explained, Russians had no concept of “national” apart from their language. Everything else was owned, named after, or donated by the tsar, like an indulgent father to his children. He was working in the tsar’s observatory, under the direction of the tsar’s astronomer. To the very progressive-minded Abbe, the tsar’s authority had infantilized his people, turning their protests into futile acts of petty vandalism, their celebrations into drunken brawls, their marriages into loveless quarrels.
    While there, Abbe fell in love with Struve’s youngest half sister, Ämalie, and planned to marry her, and even to stay in Russia, or take her back to