As a kid, my best friend had a handmade sign mounted on his bedroom wall, a quote from Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” You can read the pseudo-aphorism a number of ways, or just chuckle and move on, but it brings together two elements of the temporal dimension, the abstract and the social. On the one hand, time is a convenience used by physicists to solve equations, a lone “t” surrounded by Greek letters. On the other, it’s an assembled scaffolding on which to hang personal narratives and collective endeavor. When a mechanical hand points at 12, let’s...

Source: Wall Street Journal July 20, 2020 22:30 UTC