Irish Time
Irish Time
By Maeve Reilly
Maeve noted the following about her story “Irish Time”: “It was written a number of years ago when I moved alone to an old stone cottage on a mountainside in County Leitrim, Ireland, and lived without a phone or car, and, as I focus on here, free from the domination of the Clock. Living in this way, I was changed radically. I've been writing a book about that experience and my transformation, and this is one of the chapters.”
By Maeve Reilly
A change in the rate of interaction is, let’s face it, a change in the nature of the interaction.1
In this place the earth turns in its own sweet time. It’s so quiet, I sometimes hear, or think I hear, the scrape of the old shale as it turns on its tilted iron axis. The soft rhythm of this place is having an effect on me. When I’m gathering sticks or filling the creel my mind isn’t racing ahead to the next thing or the past thing like it used to. I’m eyeing the shape and color of each stick and sod. I’m applying all my attention to breaking the larger ash branches into basket-size pieces. I smell the earth, and whenever I look up I feel exalted by the mountain and light- and cloud-flung sky.
What time is it? Who cares? I’m several miles from town, up a steep mountain road, I’ve no car, no mobile phone. The Week-At-A-Glance I brought with me from my old life has seven blank days this week, next week, every week. My only ‘appointment’, on Sunday at eleven, doesn’t need to be entered. Maud rings me Saturday nights and asks if I’ll be going to church and would I like a lift. My answer is always yes, and yes.
The only public marking of time is the ringing of the Angelus bells rising on the steep air from the convent below. There’s no sense of business time here, though there is the business day, which begins at half past nine, at the earliest. Many places close for lunch between one and two, and nearly every place shutters for the day at half past five. But shops can close at any hour, and sometimes there’ll be a note on the door–Back Soon–sometimes not.
People don’t rush here. Maybe they do in Dublin, I don’t know, but in this part of the country, people will say, there’s no hurry on me. And this tells me they are ruled from within rather than from without. That if hurry can be put on you, it can be taken off you. When I think of the difference, I realize that in my former life I was a puppet. Someone above (or inside my head) was always pulling my strings–hurry up, get a move on!
I’m learning that Irish time is different. When Maud says she’ll be down in ten minutes, it translates to she’ll be down in less than an hour. When Ollie Scollan tells me he’ll deliver my shopping in an hour, it could be two hours till I see him, or three. And even though it’s the end of his work day, and he’s on his way home to his tea, he never sets the box of groceries on the counter and rushes back to his van. Instead he’ll say, Now. How are you keeping up here? Then he’ll gaze out the window toward the mountain, though I believe he’s actually gazing into a vast storage vault of The Past, rummaging for a story that will interest me. Like the time he nodded toward the Rayburn and told me his family were the first in town to have a solid-fuel range. The day it was delivered, he said, it was as if a helicopter had landed on the High Street of Drumshanbo. Everyone came to gawk, he said, and it took ten men to carry it into the house.
Maud and Ollie aren’t late when they arrive, or when they leave. They’re operating on Irish time, which has, I’m beginning to see, very little to do with clocks. Perhaps it's a medium for stories and music rather than a commodity prone to scarcity as we modernistas are conditioned to think of it.
My American habit of punctuality is beginning to feel maladaptive. And now I’m questioning the validity of the clock itself. It is, after all, a relatively recent invention, a new requirement of the machine-powered market economy, not of the land-based seasonal world before it. A new way devised to enslave and torment the natural world, if you count us humans as part of the natural world, and I do, most of the time.
Here I find that people think nothing of sitting down with a cup of tea at any hour of the day or night and talking for hours as if there was no such thing in the world as a clock. Where I’m from, we humans live minute to minute under its coercion, and in many cases proudly so. It’s become a kind of status symbol–the amount of appointments crammed into your calendar–and stress become a symptom of virtue.
What I'm calling Irish time would, of course, be looked on askance by the Puritans and their industrious descendants. Since time is money, you must make the most of it, not squander it by sitting around drinking tea and chatting with your neighbor.
The clock may have its place, but here it’s an instrument of approximation. And I’m beginning to understand that clock time is merely mechanical, impossibly precise and consistent. We humans know that the hour stalled in rush hour is excruciatingly longer than the hour spent talking with a friend. But clock time insists against the truth of our experience, it wants us to believe that every hour is identical, that every minute has the same value.
Peter Burke’s sermon last Sunday was like nothing I’d ever heard from a pulpit. He talked about leaving the crowd and finding the quiet. He said to a packed church, we can only properly pray when we are still. He is a beautiful man, this priest, and his words fell on my mind like balm. I think there must be some connection between slow and quiet, fast and noise.
There’s an Irish saying, ‘when God made time he made plenty of it’, and I see now that’s one reason I’ve come to live in Ireland. Before it was only an idea, a longing for something I didn’t know–to experience days as whole things–as gods, as the great Emerson said. Time here has no velocity, but it has depth, it has mercy.
1Sven Birkerts, The Millenial Warp
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