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her native Germany. But he had not taken into account another aspect of time, the full weight of German conservatism. His formal request for Ämalie’s hand was rejected by Otto. It was her duty as youngest daughter, he dictated, to look after her stepmother; and that is precisely what she did, right up to the years preceding the First World War. If they had married, and if Abbe had stayed in Europe and headed a European observatory, standard time assuredly would not have evolved as it did.
    Following the rejection, he left Russia within weeks and eventually, after a few years heading the Cincinnati Observatory,reshaped his very productive life from academic astronomy to weather forecasting. In his Cincinnati years he, too, published standard-time proposals for reforming North American time-reckoning, featuring time zones and a Greenwich prime. It was as a weatherman, however, not a railroad executive, that the need for standardization pressed most heavily on him. In his Washington office, he received hourly weather bulletins telegraphed from dozens of reporting stations, hundreds and even thousands of miles away. They all had to be translated into a single isotemp, “real time,” in order to predict the direction and magnitude of storm fronts, then plotted on his maps of isobars and isotherms (dreamy, elliptical, transitory lines, so different from the inflexible bars of longitude) and then resubmitted to, or retranslated in different local times for, subscribers in hundreds of daily newspapers.
    Nearly twenty years after his great Russian adventure, Cleveland Abbe was reunited in Washington, as one of four American delegates to the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference, with Ämalie’s half brother, Charles de Struve, the Russian ambassador to the United States and chief Russian delegate to the conference. The elective affinities of the world’s intellectual elites were no less on display in the 1880s than they are today.
    MY PARTICULAR family history is hardly exceptional among immigrant groups, especially considering that my parents were the least exotic of all foreigners in the United States: Canadians. It’s rather like a Scotsman claiming immigrant status in England. Nevertheless, the silence that exists between familiars, or nations, often bears close attention.
    My paternal grandfather, Achille Blais, was born to tenant farmers in 1865, the son of two hundred years of tenant farmers, in the Beauce region south of Quebec City. When he was nineteen, in 1884 (the year, coincidentally, of the Prime MeridianConference in Washington), he left the land and became a day laborer
(journalier
) for a dollar a day in the sawmills of a newly established village named Lac-Mégantic. He knew wood; he built furniture, he was a carpenter. His eighteenth child, my father, Léo Roméo, was born in Lac-Mégantic in 1905. My eighteen aunts and uncles, only five of whom lived past the age of seven, were named with an eye to eternity: Homer, Ovid, Hector, Ulysses, Iphygenia, Athena … down to the two youngest, Roméo and Rolland.
    It broke my heart, a few years ago, researching the parish records of old Lac-Mégantic for an earlier book. Baby Ulysse Blais, dead at three years, six months. Baby Athénée, dead at two. They were all victims of the “natural” world of diseases borne in the animal and human putrescence that pooled in the stagnant water (kept artificially flooded by the lumber mill in order to float their logs). My grandparents serenely buried them and carried on. Eighty-five percent of their children, as Faulkner put it, “manured the earth.” Two or three times a year, my grandfather affixed his “X” in the parish birth and death records, just above the priest who was the lone literate in the village. This is the way it had always been, and the way it would have stayed, in a natural world. Something in Achille, however, made it change. Time was in the air. Perhaps time had something to do with it.
    He walked over the