“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils”
—Hector Berlioz
I measure rain by the bucket. I don’t mean in the sense of the old saying “It’s raining buckets,” but literally. Whenever it rains, I put a galvanized bucket under the downspout of an eavestrough that drains the small roof over my back stairs. I use the rainwater for my indoor plants. Half a bucket is a decent rain. A full bucket is a downpour, a real drenching. Over the past few days I could have filled the bucket a dozen times.
The first week of April, right on cue, brought not just showers but a deluge that went on for days. Rain drummed on my roof at night. Rain poured down the trunk of the maple tree on my front lawn and made little piles of foam where it met the soil. When I drove to the grocery store, the rain rinsed my winter-dingy van cleaner than a car wash. During one downpour, the street in front of my house brimmed with water to the curb tops. It became a shallow canal that rushed westward. When wind blew rain against my windows I couldn’t tell glass from water—they looked as if they were melting. Through them I could see a watery world that wobbled and wiggled. Robins feasted on drowning worms and wet, bedraggled squirrels sat glumly on tree branches. Every evening, the news showed pictures of marooned cars and basements with chairs bobbing in thigh-deep water.
One wet afternoon, I drove downtown to meet my publisher. Rain had soaked everything. Billboard advertisements were peeling off—a fashion model’s forehead had folded over her face. Dark fingers of damp concrete streaked the sides of apartment buildings. In my car, the dashboard clock was too misty to read the time. I tried to wipe it off but couldn’t—the condensation was trapped inside. My chronometer had become a tiny clockwork terrarium. Above me, even the clouds pressed closer, as if the weight of the rain had pulled them down from the sky. They were so low that the tops of skyscrapers disappeared into them—including my publisher’s building. I parked in a humid underground parking lot, grabbed my umbrella, and walked outside.
Water world. Cars sprayed by like motorboats, arcing canopies of water over sidewalks. Umbrellas bobbed everywhere, like glistening tents. They crashed into each other above the crowded sidewalks. The air was warm, though, and there was a secret, vernal thrill lurking in the lush humidity. It was a spring rain that promised things. When I got to my publisher’s, I shook out my umbrella in the lobby and took an elevator up into the clouds.
Looking out of the windows on the twentieth floor was like looking out of an airplane descending through overcast. There was nothing to see but a featureless, marine-grey tone with a hint of blue-green—a soothing, aquatic view. It was good to be inside, under bright lights, and dry. On the wall opposite the elevators was a large, stainless-steel clock and I was surprised to see that I was on time, despite my misty automobile timepiece and the many small distractions that kept me anchored in the present. Outside, the downpour seemed to have washed both past and future away—but here, in the office tower, time ruled again.
My publisher took me to an office with large, plate-glass windows that held back an ocean of fog. The noise and drama of the city was smothered in it; all was ethereal and calm. Our meeting went well, and afterward she walked me to the elevator. Through the windows I noticed that the clouds were at last beginning to lift. The elevator doors closed, and I went back down into the rain. As I was driving home, casting my mind forward, thinking about what I could make for dinner, a flash lit up the whole sky and turned it a deep, electric green. Lightning. The first storm of the year. Thunder was booming when I got home and gusts bent the new daffodils in my garden. Jupiter was busy, his chariot thundering over the clouds.
the god of time
Time is a modern invention. As Lewis Mumford wrote in Technics and Civilization, “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous.” We take time for granted, living inside the minutes, months, and years as if they were rooms in our parents’ home, familiar and unchanging. But there was also a time before clocks, personified in mythology—an era when the most remarkable aspect of time was not that it could be measured accurately, but that it flowed, implacably, in a single direction instead of lingering forever in eternity. This is the tyranny of time, a moving sidewalk we can’t step off. But the gods understood that this quality of time was both a blessing—giving us the cyclical bounty of the seasons—and a tragedy, reminding us of our mortality.
According to Roman mythology, Jupiter was the son of Saturn. Jupiter was known to the Greeks as Zeus and they refer to his father as Cronos. Although classical scholars differ in their interpretations, down through the ages, Cronos, or Saturn, has become popularized as the god of time. Both Romans and Greeks understood that Jupiter/Zeus ruled all the gods. In his rages—which were frequent—he would sometimes hurl lightning bolts to earth. His hair-trigger temper and sense of regal entitlement were traits he inherited from his father. Cronos was a temperamental patriarch, not unlike a Mafia don—the boss you don’t want to cross.
Cronos was born to the first two gods, Uranus and Gaia, who represent heaven and earth respectively. Uranus, a tyrant, was deathly afraid of being usurped by his children. To ensure his rule, he confined Cronos and his siblings in Gaia’s womb. Gaia, indignant at not being allowed to bring her children out into the world, subverted her husband’s wishes by secretly slipping a sharp-edged sickle to her son Cronos. The next time Uranus “came close,” as one legend delicately put it, Cronos swung the sickle and castrated him. The blood that spilled from Uranus’s wound then formed the Giants and the Furies, while his penis, which had been thrown into the sea, took on a life of its own and eventually transformed into Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.
