Clock
I forget the title of the story, but Kafka had written one where a seemingly small transaction takes place between two men, one asking the other for the time. They come to the conclusion that neither one can say what time it is, because the clocks are not in unison. Gregor Samsa even has a fearful, panic-stricken moment over a clock: he sees that his is past 4 and though he set it for that hour, the alarm had not rung at all.
"Seemingly small" because it is something that is constantly dealt with in life, in real life, in the lives of actual people and not characters in his parable. So much is hinged upon those two arms of time, though, and we look to the face of a clock with the same semblance of trust that we give to the faces of our own parents: their words are final, their phrase is fixed, and what they say is as if spoken by the mumbling mouth of god himself.
What time is it, Sir?
It is 1 o'clock.
Thank you. I had better hurry, or I will be late!
Yes, one always fears being late. Clocks are often late themselves, or, rather, they often point to a time that is not quite accurate and thus cause people to be late for things. There are degrees to which this lateness becomes a problem, of course, and being late for a cup of coffee is a world apart from being late to your own kid brother's funeral or to meet with the doctor to hear word about whether or not that lump is of the fatal kind or not.
The double-face of this clock (yes, "two faced" fits quite nice!) says two things at once: "It is 1PM" and "It is 12:58PM" and both of those statements are only as right as the person perceiving them. Depending on whether I am late for a bus or late for a funeral, the information given to me by each of the clock faces will color my entire day (or life) from that point on. The 1PM view tells me that I am late, that I have not a single minute to spare, that the world has shifted definitively from the hour of 12 to the hour of 1, and there is no rewinding it. Instead of receiving a metaphorical hug by way of a spare minute, I am left only with the coldest shoulder on earth: that of Time. 12:58PM, on the other hand, seems like a miraculous gift and those precious two minutes are a bottomless expanse of cool relief to the hotness that courses through the body, always forcing tick tock urgency like a tick tock clock tick tocking its way toward some end or another.
Time, that sometimes failing / sometimes gushing currency --- either out of it or in a pile of far too much of it, and only in the slowest of moments does it start to taste a bit sweeter. Clocks are scary things because they are at once so infallible and riddled with error: perfect and not quite so. We search their faces, we trust their words, and we curse them often enough to eventually start to distrust them. More on "time" can be found within the confines of this very space: here, here and here.
