US REFLECTION · CONSUMPTION & COMPETITION GAZETTE

One was decreed. The other was found. Only one has an author.

I. The frame, still held by a thread

I begin with something I wrote in Geneva, and then leave it behind. In a classification of long constants and short constants, I said of the first — the planet, time, rivers, mountains, oceans, water, sand, the sun, the moon — that they “are not produced by human will but precede every norm,” that they are “frames, not creations.”¹ Of the second — a dam, a pyramid, a monument, an institution — that they are dated artefacts, and destructible.

The line was right. But look at where I was standing when I drew it. I was asking what these long constants support: territory grounds the State, the biological condition grounds the law of persons, time grounds prescription. I named things that no one had set — but I named them by the use a legislator could make of them. I saw the thing without an author, and I described it from the author’s chair.

A thread still tied the frame to the room. This essay cuts it. It does not ask what the long constants hold up. It asks what is left of them when there is no norm at all, and no one to set one — and it tries to end where that question leads, rather than at the edge, looking in.

The whole distance is contained in a single grandeur: an interval — a gap lived by no one, appearing in no clock and no ledger. I will lay two of them side by side. One was set by an act of law. The other was found on a bench. Everything is in that difference, and it can be checked.

II. The interval that was set

In October 1884 the Washington conference fixed the world’s time zones on the meridian of Greenwich.² France did not sign. It could not: the Paris meridian was an instrument of sovereignty, and to concede the origin of time is to concede the utterance of time.

The question was not left to theory. It had a man to handle it, and he was a mathematician: Henri Poincaré. In The Measure of Time (1898) he established that we have no direct intuition of the simultaneity of two events occurring in different places, nor of the equality of two durations; that these notions must be defined by a practical rule — the exchange of signals, under the hypothesis that light takes the same time to travel out as to travel back; and that all such definitions are, in the end, “the fruit of an unconscious opportunism.”³

Poincaré was not only the theorist of the question; he was its administrator. A member of the Bureau des longitudes from 1893, he presided over it in 1899. He was secretary of the commission on the decimalisation of time, wrote its reports — and lost: the world did not follow, the government would not move alone, the commission was dissolved in 1900.⁴ A man who tried to legislate the clock, and failed.