Time jumps or crawls

On Sunday March 26 it’s the turn of European clocks to be twisted forward an hour into “daylight saving time,” in which the Sun reaches its highest not at 12 noon but at “1 PM.”

America is on the false time for eight months, from March 12 to November 5; Europe for only seven, March 26 to October 29.

Extended Train of Thought Department

Whatever the clock says, days get shorter as we get older.

That is because “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,” and have not achieved what we hoped to. Periodic chores, such as laundry or taxes, come around faster. For a child, a day is like a whole summer. How does time pass for a prisoner? – it’s one of those things that do not bear thinking about.

I would go mad in one hour of being trapped under the rubble of a collapsed building, let alone 147. We read of a few people being pulled alive from the February 6 earthquake after times like that. Say “thousand and one” sixty times; that’s one minute. One had a metal rod through her leg. I think the last (though I can’t find the article again) was 296 hours. Eternal time, pinned by chunks of concrete, not knowing whether anyone is even trying to reach you. Poe would make another “Pit and Pendulum” out of the torments that fill such hours. Of the 40,000 who died, the lucky were those who were killed instantly.

Back when my passion was Middle Eastern Bronze Age archaeology, I imagined a future of going excavating in the small region that is the hinge of the Middle East, half way between Egypt and Babylonia: a region of complex geography, where the east-west band of the Alpine-Himalayan mountain system is met by the south-north rift-valley system of East Africa, the Red Sea, and the Jordan, Leontes, and Orontes valleys.

The hinge region, where Syria meets Anatolia – details from the maps, ancient and modern, on the back and front covers of Turkey, A Very Brief History

The region is dotted with tells, the mounds that contain the layered remains of ancient cities. Here were discovered the civilization of Ugarit, with its own Semitic language; other cities, Alalakh, Mari; in the wrinkle of valleys around the upper Euphrates were sites associated with the Hittites, Hurrians, Mitanni, and other peoples perhaps ancestral to the Kurds; during the Hellenistic age (after the Macedonian overthrow of the Persian empire), Antioch on the Orontes was the capital of the vast Seleucid empire stretching to India; in the Middle Ages the Crusaders established a principality of Antioch and a county of Edessa; through the Taurus and Amanus ranges led the passes called the Cilician Gates and Syrian Gates from the western world into the eastern; the Amanus, or Musa Dagh, was the scene of the hold-out of Armenians against Turkish genocide in 1915. The region is now the Syrian province of Idlib and the Turkish province of Hatay, which the French colonial rulers of Syria gave to Turkey in 1939.

It is now one of the most unfortunate of the current world’s unfortunate regions. Idlib is crammed with Syrians who have had to flee Assad’s regime; among these refugees, the democratic opposition is under the harsh rules of the Islamist opposition; Assad’s Russian and Iranian allies launch aistrikes on everyone whether activist or civilian, and their schools and hospitals; the regime threatens a final assault, which would scoop opponents into Assad’s torture dungeons. And on top of this comes not just one earthquake but its aftershocks and then another. The city hit worst was Antakya, the ancient Antioch.

The region of fold-mountains is prone to earthquakes. They must have happened anciently too. But then there were not so many millions of people and they did not live in high-rise apartment blocks.

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