The Rented Hour

There is a small glowing oblong in every pocket in England, and inside it is a grid. The grid is made of little rectangles, each twenty minutes high, and the rectangles are for sale. I do not mean that the man who owns the oblong sells them; I mean that he gives them away to anyone who asks, which is a much more alarming form of commerce. A stranger in another city, whom he has never seen and would not recognise in the street, sends him a small electrical request, and he opens his grid and finds that Tuesday at half past two is now the property of that stranger. He is a landlord who has let every room in his house, and lives in the passage.

I call this a tragedy and not a convenience, and I shall be told that I am being romantic about the past. I am not romantic about the past. The past had its clocks, and worse things than clocks. But it is worth remembering who made the clock and what for. The mechanical clock was built by monks, in order to get up in the dark and sing. Its purpose was to carve out of the night a time that belonged to God and to nobody else; the bell did not say “work,” it said “stop.” The factory took the monk’s instrument and turned it round, so that the bell said “begin,” and the clocking-in machine became the one confessor that every workman was obliged to visit twice a day. That was bad enough. But the factory at least kept its clock on the wall of the factory, and a man walked out from under it at six. The new thing is that he has put the clock in his waistcoat and taken the factory home.

Now the first thing that has been lost is the season, and the season is a thing about which the modern man is really ignorant, in the way he is ignorant of Latin. He thinks a season is a kind of weather. It is nothing of the sort. A season is a time with a character, as a man has a character; it is a stretch of days that are for something. Advent is for waiting, and Lent is for going without, and the twelve days after Christmas are for doing nothing whatever at great expense. The seasons were not given to us by the Meteorological Office; they were given by God, through the Church, as a kind of landscape of the year, with hills in it and hollows, so that a man might know where he was in the way he knows whether he is going uphill. The grid has no hills. Every rectangle is the same height as every other; the twenty minutes before Easter are the same shape as the twenty minutes after it. It is as if someone had taken a map of England and replaced it with graph paper, and then congratulated himself that the graph paper was so much easier to fold.

The second thing that has been lost is the promise. I want to be exact here, because the two things look alike and are opposites. A promise is an act of a free man by which he binds his own future; it is the one way in which a creature who lives in time can reach forward and lay hold of a day that has not come, and say, “that day is already given.” It is the foundation of marriage, of friendship, of every treaty, and of the only kind of honour that an ordinary man can have. When I promise to come to your house on Thursday, Thursday is changed. It is no longer a blank; it is a day with your face in it. Now observe the calendar invitation. It is not a promise; it is a reservation. It does not say “I will come“; it says “this slot is held.” It can be declined by a button, moved by a button, and cancelled by a button, and the button has no shame because the button has no face. The promise was a chain that a man forged for himself and wore gladly. The invitation is a ticket, and a ticket has no obligation in it at all; one simply fails to turn up, and the rectangle goes white again, and nobody has lied, because nobody ever spoke.

And the third thing, which is the deepest, is the feast; and here I must say something about repetition, because the grid has a trick called the recurring task, and it is the devil’s parody of the holiest thing I know. I have said elsewhere that the sun rises every morning because God says to it, “Do it again,” with the undiminished delight of a child who has been thrown in the air and wants to be thrown again. The feast is of that kind. Christmas comes round not because it is on a schedule but because joy, being inexhaustible, wants to be had again; and the proof is that nobody, on the twenty-sixth of December, has ever felt that Christmas had been “done.” The recurring task comes round for the opposite reason. It comes round because nobody wants it and the machine has been told to produce it whether anybody wants it or not. Every Monday at nine it rises like a pale sun over a planet without seasons, and the men gather under it with the same faces, and what they feel is not that they are doing it again but that it is being done to them again. That is the whole difference between a feast and a function. The feast repeats because it is loved. The function repeats because it is set.

What all this does to liberty is easy to see once it is said. A free man’s day is an open country. He may ride across it in any direction, or sit down in the middle of it, or waste it; and the right to waste it is the very mark of his owning it, as the right to let a field lie fallow is the mark of owning the field. The man with the grid does not own his day. He is a tenant in it, and a tenant on a weekly tenancy at that, with a different landlord every twenty minutes. He cannot waste his afternoon because it is not his to waste; it has been let, in pieces, to a committee in Leeds and a dentist and a man about the drains. And the subtle thing, the thing that makes it a tyranny and not merely a nuisance, is that he did it himself. No one came with soldiers. He gave each rectangle away freely, one at a time, each for an excellent reason, until there was nothing left of the country but the hedges between the fields.

What it does to friendship is worse, because friendship is the one thing in the world that cannot be scheduled, for the very good reason that it is what happens when nothing is scheduled. A friend is not a man you have an appointment with. A friend is the man who turns up. The whole glory of the thing is its superfluity: he had no business to come, there was no item on the agenda, and he stayed three hours and nothing was decided. The grid has no rectangle for that, and cannot have, because a rectangle is a space reserved for a purpose and friendship has none. So the modern man, who is very lonely, finds that he has to make an appointment to see his friend, and finds further that the appointment is now in competition with the dentist and the drains, and loses, because the dentist has a purpose and the friend has only himself. He will tell you he is too busy to see his friends. He is not too busy. He has let the room.

And what it does to the soul I can only put in the language of the soil, which is the right language, since the soul is a thing that grows. Every farmer knows that land must lie fallow or it dies; that a field which is cropped every year without rest gives less every year until it gives nothing, and the dust blows off it. The soul is the same. It needs stretches of time in which nothing is sown and nothing is reaped, in which a man lies on his back and looks at the ceiling and is, for an hour, of no use to anyone. The Jews knew this and made it a commandment, which is the only way of protecting a thing that cannot defend itself. The grid does not forbid the Sabbath. It does something cleverer: it offers to put the Sabbath in a rectangle, between the drains and the dentist, as a recurring task called “rest,” with a reminder fifteen minutes before. And the man accepts, and sets the reminder, and the field is ploughed under for the last time.

I said that time was given by God to be squandered or consecrated, and I notice that I have been allowed to use both words. That is the point. Both are things a man does with what is his. You cannot squander a rented hour; you can only fail to attend it. And you cannot consecrate a rented hour, because consecration is giving a thing to God, and the hour already belongs to the committee in Leeds. The two great human acts in time, the wasting of it and the hallowing of it, both need the same prior thing, which is that the time should be one’s own; and that is exactly what the grid, with the owner’s full cooperation, has quietly abolished.

I do not propose that we smash the oblongs; the smashing of machines is itself a kind of machinery and never works. I propose something much more violent. I propose that a man should look at his grid on a Sunday night and find in it one white rectangle, and leave it white; and that when the stranger in the other city asks for it, as he will, the man should say no, not because he has something better to do but because he has nothing to do, and it is his. That one white rectangle is the last acre of the open country. Hold it, and the seasons will come back into it, and sooner or later a friend will turn up in it, and sooner than you think it will have a feast in it. Let it go, and you will have a perfectly efficient week, and you will have it again next week, and again, and the machine will say “do it again” without the smallest delight, for ever.