JULY AND THE FLOW OF TIME
Borland, Hal
JULY and the Flow of Time by HAL BORLAND Year after year July seems to creep up behind us, and, since "Bang!" now is outlawed virtually everywhere, shout "Boo!" to remind us that the year is half...
...And every now and then, when the outside pressure gets a little too strong, we go down to the lake and watch the stars in the gently lapping water and listen to the grinding of a few more grains of sand...
...If so, I have a little secret to share with them...
...Mind you, I am not even hinting that there is anything sacred about work...
...A little later we spent a late afternoon on the deck of a boathouse at a nearby lake, facing the whole lake and the tumbled hills beyond to the west...
...it adds up to the same total, time after time...
...And I wondered why and for what...
...Time hasn't changed a noticeable fraction of a second in ten million years...
...But even the microseconds still add up to the same year the seconds did, and the minutes, the hours, the days...
...Everywhere I look I see that living things work and only dead or dying things don't work...
...He must number his hours too...
...The afternoon flowed away, the sun settled behind the glowing hills, the lake was a vast shimmer of light reflected from a darkening sky for a long time, and at last there was darkness and there were stars overhead and stars in the still-lapping water, stars that rocked and danced while the water ground a few more grains of sand...
...In May I went out and watched the opening of buds on the sugar maples, deliberate as the emergence of stars in the night sky...
...It may be that, since Southern California is well stocked with retired people living on pensions, annuities, and Social Security, the researchers think all people, of all ages, can and should live on the same basis...
...Maybe in late July or August, or maybe between New Year's and Groundhog Day, but not in April or May when every natural force in sight is working around the clock, getting things going...
...But in that case, there wouldn't be anybody here to know or to discuss the merits of work and leisure...
...Even those lilies of the field which, according to the Scriptures, neither toil nor spin, do work...
...We keep talking about "our world," instead of recognizing that we are only squatters here, tenants who happen to be tolerated...
...By the end of May we were right where we always are, ready to start haying...
...Into seconds...
...with no income there would be no taxes...
...High overhead a red-tailed hawk sailed with scarcely a feather's quiver, circling slowly and gradually working toward the hills...
...Without it there would be no income...
...How anybody with a grain of common sense could recommend a substitute for the idea of work in the spring is beyond me...
...and I don't know whether we are hurrying toward (Copyright © 7968 by Hal Borland) heaven or running madly away from hell...
...Summer," Horace said, "treads on heels of Spring...
...Borland is well-known for his editorials on nature in The New York Times and for his books, which include "Hill Country Harvest," "Sundial of the Seasons," and "Countryman: A Summary of Belief...
...By late April we told ourselves we were two weeks ahead of normal...
...I can't imagine where those sociologists got the notion that the work-ethic is passe...
...If all human life were blotted out, that same shadow would have crossed the moon precisely as it did, and the course of earth, moon, and sun would continue totally unchanged...
...I don't know how it is in California—I haven't been there in some years—but I know that if I were to sit down out in the side yard and try to develop a leisure-ethic, even at the end of June, I would soon be grown over by grass and weeds and it wouldn't be long before my bones would be bleaching...
...Obviously, we have been running madly for a long time now, and whether to or from doesn't seem to matter much...
...Isolate a city for thirty days, and that city suffers and faces ruin and death—even in the summertime, when the natural world is as nearly hospitable to every form of life as one could wish...
...We have to listen for another beat, another rhythm...
...Quite apart from any meaning the eager symbolist might find, that was an evening when the affairs of men seemed almost picayune and the particular follies of the day made no HAL BORLAND recently received the 1968 John Burroughs Award for his nature writing...
...We keep trying to get away from the natural world, or to change it into something different...
...And here we are now, picking fresh peas, living high on green beans and baby beets and carrots and such lettuce as you never can get in the market, drooling over tomatoes big as baseballs and green as grass, wondering whether they will ripen before the sweet corn is ready, and hoping the raccoons don't find the corn before we get a chance at it...
...As I said, we are picking fresh peas now and hoping we get roasting ears before the coons find that they are prime...
...in the end they are dependent on the country...
...If they didn't there would be little difference between January and July except in the temperature of the air...
...there is no audible answer...
...Time, the passage of the season, the lunar month, the day...
...We watched the hawk until we lost it in the sun, and when I closed my eyes all I could see was that blinding dazzle, a timeless star so bright even my eyelids couldn't shut it out...
...I saw the milkweeds come up like asparagus shoots and leaf out and prepare to bloom, blossoms with the scent of honeysuckle and tuberose, which would' become silvery-green goosehead pods that would not ripen and burst and strew their airy cargo until the month of October...
...without taxes there would be nothing for the Government to appropriate as subsidies and to sustain those industries that provide most of the spending money in Southern California and Texas...
...And it said, "We have not yet begun to develop a substitute principle for the sanctity of work...
...So he invented a clock to divide the days into hours...
...I shan't lie awake nights waiting to hear it, I might add...
...sense whatever...
...Time is out of joint...
...Every plant, every bird, every animal, every insect expends energy in the process of sustaining life and achieving growth...
...I admit that there were times, when, right in the midst of haying or other seasonal work, I heard that ghostly voice shouting, "Hurry, hurry, hurry...
...Not only the times, but time, that tempus that even the old Romans knew tends to fugit...
...Back in mid-April, when the affairs of man had reached a dismal summary of madness and murder, followed by arson and pillage, we spent a long evening watching a spectacular full moon climb the sky, slowly go into eclipse, slowly emerge again, and continue its stately journey across the sky...
...It is all a part of the season and the year...
...And then I looked around and knew that the trees and the grass and even the sun and the moon paid no attention to such orders...
...But somewhere along the way, man, the incurable counter, was no longer content to number his years and his days...
...Microseconds...
...Annuities, pensions, and Social Security all are based on the negoti-tiable products of the work-ethic —income, investments, and taxes...
...When I listen closely I can hear the soft whisper of sand flowing through the neck of the hour-glass, the same flow it has had since time began...
...We worked for them...
...Cut off a city's water, its outside sources of food, or even its throbbing lines of power from distant sources, and see how many July or August days it can survive...
...Without work-ethic income we would, perforce, have a leisure-ethic bigger than we had back in the early 1930s...
...and as I read that report I wondered just what ". . . we have to get outdoors and sit down, now and then, and let time flow through us . . ." kind of never-never land those theorists inhabit...
...But last spring, just when we were getting the garden planted and the new alfalfa started in the lower meadow where the weeds had almost taken over, there was a most peculiar report from the West Coast...
...A group called the Southern California Research Council made a kind of analysis of sociological trends and came up with the same old hackneyed finding that we are going to have more leisure than we know what to do with in the next twenty years...
...And we folk up here in the hills will sweat, as usual, through the summer work and have no more than the usual complaints, chiefly because we still recognize the common principle that I suppose must be called the work-ethic, though it really isn't much more than the old truism that a man must earn his way in this world somehow...
...And it wasn't hard to settle down and keep to the rhythm of the day and the season...
...Revolution, war, political crises, deficit financing, business recession, threats to civil liberties—the whole structure of the world appears to be collapsing...
...Last night I was re-reading a book by Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, and in a July entry—the year was 1951, seventeen years ago—he wrote, of the morning newspaper, "Ah, yes, the news is ominous...
...As I said, we had an early spring...
...This obviously was the next thing that must be done to save our endangered soul and our social scale of values...
...Not even a full-blown leisure-ethic can make such a beleaguered city tolerable...
...All I know is that when I ask "Why...
...Whether we gain or lose two weeks in March and April doesn't much matter, because we don't gain an hour, really, or lose one, in the long run...
...That is a part of what I mean...
...But that, we hope, is beside the point...
...Then to split the hours into minutes...
...The first man who stood on his two feet and faced the sunrise and had a glimmering of wonder about time knew no longer span of daylight than I know today...
...But it is not a curse, either...
...I hope that isn't what they are advocating...
...Things were on schedule...
...We sat there on the deck as the sun deliberately eased toward the hilltop horizon, gilding the water and shimmering hosts of newly-hatched gnats, creatures of only a few brief days, like dancing clouds of twinkling silver motes freshly evaporated from the lake itself...
...We planted those peas and those rows of corn, and we weeded and hoed and tended them...
...Time itself is unchanged, but man has snared himself in his own time-traps...
...That, as I say, was just when April was pushing into May and things were getting ready for June...
...We didn't create anything here but the cities and their appurtenances, and...
...I saw the way the giant mullein stalk begins to climb from the gray-green rosette of winter leaves, a six-foot stalk that would take three months to grow and bloom and make its seeds...
...Faster, faster, fasterfast-erfaster...
...If there is some other way to finance them, word of it hasn't got to this part of the country yet...
...Shadbush was just opening bud...
...Hepatica was in bloom, and bloodroot and anemones...
...Today it is July...
...We are so reluctant to learn, or even to acknowledge the obvious truths all around us...
...There may be some comfort in knowing this isn't a new phenomenon, a product of rocketry, radar, lasers, and computers, but I don't find it soothing comfort chiefly because the air echoes with peremptory words, "Hurry, hurry, hurry...
...Ovid said so, and about the same time he was saying that another poet whose full name was Quintus Hora-tius Flaccus was compressing into one sentence all I tried to say in a whole paragraph...
...With luck, the cities will not be so beleaguered, and we will somehow get through another summer...
...Grass grew as deliberately then as now, and buds opened, and the moon had its phases, just as today...
...Nature somehow apportions the energy to get it done, and when we know what we are doing we do pretty much the same thing...
...His solar year was the same one I know, and his lunar month...
...Then May came and evened things off, as it always does...
...There is so much to be done, and just so much time to do it...
...It was only a couple of weeks ago, or so it seems, that we were in the midst of the warmest April on record here in our hill country, planting peas and onion sets and lettuce and carrots, and having to remind ourselves that it is not safe to put out tomato plants till the end of May...
...They work...
...There was just enough air in motion to make the water lap at the rocks along the shoreline, that eternal slap of water on stone that has created virtually all the sand on earth, a sound that makes me think of the hourglass of the eons, pebbles grinding into sand which flows forever through the slender neck of time itself...
...So, even up here, away from the crowds, we have to get outdoors and sit down, now and then, and let time flow through us as it does through the universe...
...to remind us that the year is half finished...
...It was an afternoon away from the telephone and casual passers-by, a time alone with the water and the sky and the hills...
...The roots gather food from the soil, the leaves create sugars and starches by photosynthesis, and the blossoms create seeds for perpetuation of the species...
...Then it went on to say that the average American is worried about having too much spare time because of "the so-called work-ethic—the claim that work is good for the soul and stands higher intrinsically on the social scale of values than play or time off...
...Yesterday it was April...
...But even that is not new either...
Vol. 32 • July 1968 • No. 7
