Read Time Lord for Free Online Page B

border, only ten miles away, and hopped a train to Lewiston, Maine. He worked in a shoe factory, and brought his family over. Nothing vastly heroic like Sandford Fleming’s sailing the ocean and bringing his parents over in just three years—Lewiston being just seventy-five miles away—but the social change was arguably more profound. A few years later, they moved on to the Mecca of all French-Canadians, Manchester, New Hampshire, where the five surviving children found work in the spinning mills. No schooling, of course. In his lifetime my grandfather passed from “Achilles,” a classical god, tothe name of his obituary notice in New Hampshire, “Archie,” a comic-book hero, an immigrant fate. But by the time he died he was a contractor and home builder.
    In his seventy years he recapitulated not only the history of his people and their economic evolution—serf to entrepreneur—but the history of time itself. Grandfather, born into illiteracy, brutal mortality and a medieval Catholic world, entered history despite lifelong illiteracy because time, in the course of his lifetime, lost its godly authority. That dollar a day as a day laborer in Lac-Mégantic, as humble a time contract as can be imagined, led my father to a succession of marriages (at least one of them, to an
anglaise
, lasted for about fifteen years)—to Florida and to Pittsburgh, more marriages, and back to Manchester, where his life ran out. In two generations from tenant farming to house building, to my father’s prizefighting, lounge singing, liquor running, and finally, furniture selling. I was freed for college, marriage to an Indian woman, and this life outside of time altogether, a “temporal millionaire,” in the words of the social psychologist Robert Levine in
The Geography of Time:
someone, as he describes it, always ready for a movie in the afternoon or six months in another country.
    ANY ADULT alive in the 1870s and eighties, that generation of time-makers, could remember a childhood when nothing he now took for granted was in existence, or even contemplated—electric lights, the telegraph and telephone, photography, refrigeration, typewriters, the train, the steam liner, theories of evolution, the molecular theory of matter and the conservation of energy. So much change in so little time; we can’t imagine the excitement and the anxiety Victorians felt. There were suddenly no borders, no “natural” limits. Regimes that depended on containment for self-perpetuation, like the Ottomans or the Romanovs, found themselves outflanked in every possible way.
    The outermost rings of time reform include the lifespans ofthe major figures in the movement. When Abbe and Fleming started school in the 1830s, steam locomotion barely existed, but feudalism did, and the last Romantics were still alive. They grew up with the inventions of the electric cable and the expansion of the railroad grid, they absorbed the lessons of Darwin, and lived through the daily wonders of Victorian science and technology. They watched gasoline replace coal, electricity replace steam. Most lived to see the first flight and motion pictures and to listen to wireless transmissions. They believed they had seen the end of human want and misery, and that the cycles of natural calamity had been broken by the application of reason. They believed passionately in international cooperation, and they had the model of the Prime Meridian Conference to celebrate. They died reading reports from the battlefields of World War I.
    Fleming bridges two worlds. He was born in 1827, the year Samuel Taylor Coleridge died. When he emigrated to Canada in 1845, there were only fourteen miles of railroad in the entire country. He built thousands more. He died there seventy years later, at his daughter’s home in Halifax, on a day in 1915 when Commonwealth troops were being slaughtered at Gallipoli, in the year of Frank Sinatra’s birth.

3
What Times Is It?
    He and his eighteenth-century,