What time is it, and who’s to say?
Time—clockish, ticking, rigid clockwork—is not real; or rather it isn’t natural; or rather it is human-made and therefore very real but less worthy of… something.
Time—propulsive & forward, yet retrospective, the immutable law of the universe—is real, isn’t it?
Things always seem fast in retrospect. But that’s because we only remember the highlights; it shortens the duration of the movie down to a brief trailer; college seems like yesterday because the decade since you recall in blips and blumps; the pointless meeting you’re reading this during is endless because you can recall every second of it.
Did the things you’ve forgotten even happen? How do you know?
Prove it.
2021’s Spencer is a ‘Fable from a True Tragedy.’ What’s real and what isn’t?
Did Diana really rip off her pearl necklace—the one Charles also bought for Camilla—and eat the pearls along with her soup? Of course not; right?
Who’s to say that fiction is less true than fact, though?
Was Diana obsessed with her family’s scarecrow, did she really try to break in to her ancestral home while Christmasing at Sandringham? Which staircase did she try to kill herself upon?
What time is it and who’s to say?
Growing up, my mother would never update the clocks on Daylight Savings Day, never until the day after. Instead we would look at the time on the clocks and translate it an hour or so, all day.
“Wow it’s already 3:30? Oh no it’s not! Hehe, it’s only 2:30!”
“I’m hungry, but it’s only 5?—oh wait it’s actually 6!”
And then smartphones, with their satellite-precise time maker-uppers, proliferated. The watches in our pockets always spoiled our dastardly ruse, our tiny exertion of power over human-made time we humans had no control over.
My fiancée, too, is a normal person. She updates the clocks in our house—although these days most of them take care of it themselves—when she wakes up.
So I drift around in a daze now, will for a week or so, haphazardly adding or subtracting hours from the radio-controlled kitchen clock, inevitably wrong about what time it is, or what time it used to be.
But who’s to say the clock is right? My dogs get hungry for dinner at 7, which used to be 6; my automatic lights flip on at dusk; I get sleepy at two in the afternoon.
Who’s to say that just because Diana didn’t wrench off the pearl necklace and crush the pearls with her teeth, she didn’t?
What time is it and who’s to say?