We spent the first 24 hours or so in Budapest without seeing a clock—at
least one that worked. There were no
clocks in the hotel room, and only when we were checking out at the end of our
stay did Rhonda notice the clock above the hotel desk, cleverly disguised as a
red satin pillow, as though subordinated to some kind of Late Bordello décor.
In the meantime,
the one clock we had seen clearly was the one in this photo, far up on the
Castle Hill in Buda, right across from the Matthias Church and atop one of the
few buildings not leveled by the
firefight between the Nazis and the Soviets in the siege of the city. According to our guide, the Hungarians loved
this clock not only for its survival, but also because until several years ago it
had stopped running entirely. There it
was, a frozen relic of the city's endurance, described with a kind of amused
affection by this smart, educated Hungarian who was showing us around the town.
So, why the fuss
over a stopped clock? Or better yet, why
the delight in its "silence and slow time"—a phrase from Keats about
his Grecian Urn, also famous for its pause and stillness? Are there ways, perhaps, in which the clock
was not silent at all, that it gave us a take on both time and survival and how
they fit together? More than once, our
guide waxed humorous over Hungarian, Russian, and (most acidly) Soviet time-wasting
and disorganization. No doubt he was
playing to the crowd in assuming our dislike for the Soviets (his own was deep,
and given his country's history, understandable), but it was interesting how
charitable he was to what he saw as Hungarian inefficiency. It was a kind of, "we're casual, but
that's the way we are" attitude, and the Soviets were far worse—both
inefficient and authoritarian.
I've read
somewhere that the minute hands on clocks were added late in the 15th
century at the insistence of merchants' guilds in order to determine more
precise times for work hours, deliveries, and meetings. But the first working clock we saw in
Budapest was in a place where it would seem that relaxation trumped efficiency—the
city's famous Szechenyi Baths, atop the Art Nouveau locker room/community
building, clearly visible from the middle of the hot springs pools. Rhonda and I went there on a frigid Thursday,
mainly because so many people had encouraged us to do so, though I thought that
hopping out of 90 degree water into 30 degree temperatures sounded like a
terrible idea at the time. You'd wonder
why a clock was so prominent in a place of relaxation until you read the signs—in
English, French, and German, as well as the Hungarian—cautioning that it was
wise to stay no more than twenty minutes in the hot water.
A clock, then,
whose operation was not only crucial but medicinal.
Of course we
overstayed the water's welcome, not only seduced by the heat, but also
welcoming the contrast to Budapest's prevailing December damps, made more
dismal, it seemed, because you got the readings in Celsius, and single digits
are by nature colder than double. We
were teased out of thought, as Keats would say in the same poem. Duly warned,
though, by numbers we could understand atop the functional clock, we were
seduced by a kind of eternal present, knowing that time was dutifully passing
as we lay in hot water doing nothing. We
emerged from the baths weak-kneed and good for nothing else that evening, having
lulled ourselves into holiday, but reassured by the security of measurements
that there was still a time we were passing, perhaps wasting, but that the
numbers on the clock were little more than abstractions by which we steadied
ourselves in uncertain country.
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