Keep track

It is typical to hear retirees complain that they have difficulty keeping track of which day of the week it is, I imagine more people than usual feel that way while being quarantined or working from home.  There can be a similar problem with the day of the month.  I just get clear in my mind that today is the 5th of June when it changes to the 6th. Then, I have trouble with knowing whether it is the 6th or will be the 6th. I can get help from my computer, my watch, the daily newspaper (sometimes I add "1" to the date on the paper that has been lying around since yesterday), my iPad, my cellphone etc.  

I can only think of one book about the week and the weekend and the names of the days.  That is the book "Waiting for the Weekend" by Witold Rybczynski, something I read about ten or so years ago.  

https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/search?q=Rybczynski

He is a retired professor of urban studies and architecture and has authored several books.  "Waiting for the Weekend" stresses the changes for people if their lives change from being agricultural to industrial.  Of course, "industrial" used to mean manufacturing efforts for many hands to use tools and teamwork to produce objects and goods.  I imagine it still does in most places but with the Covid-19, we can all imagine sending messages to machines from home or an office cubicle.  Most farming life focuses on daylight and starts at dawn or about then.  We have slowly changed from similarly early and long days to work days of 8 hours or less.

I find it surprising that it is the day of the week, that short little interval, that means so much and the day of the month is much less important.  As a Martian, I would guess the opposite: the day of the longer period would matter more.  It is true that in retirement, one has more choice and less steady commitment, the calendar notations of particular events more important but it is still true that the nature of my day is more affected by the day of the week than the date.

I assumed it was the Jewish emphasis on keeping the Sabbath that gave us the week but Google said it was the Babylonians that gave us seven days, based on their astronomers' ability to see seven heavenly bodies: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.  I read that the Romans copied the seven days and Europe tended to follow them.

What day of the week is it?

Jill Lepore is a member of the Harvard history faculty and also a writer for the New Yorker.  She has an article in the current issue about the history of the week.  

I find the week a subject of interest.  As Prof. Lepore mentions, days and years have rather natural markers of light and seasons but weeks are more arbitrary.   Lepore cites various attempts to create better weeks with more or less days in them but they haven't really taken off.  Personally, I think the nature of my days of the week matter more often to my life than months or years or maybe even seasons.  

Years ago, I was introduced to the book "Waiting for the Weekend" by the architect Witold Rybczynski.  He has other books and I don't usually read much about architecture but some of the interesting points about weeks and days of the week and their nature are mentioned in that book as well as in Lepore's article.  The names we use are related to Norse gods and goddesses, like Woden and Thor.  The Hebrew Bible does say that God rested on the 7th day and that passage has probably had some influence on what happens on what day.  There is also the matter of the Sabbath and a holy day of the week, on which work was to be avoided to create a day of rest and holy thought.  The actual day of special attention to life and holy matters is different from ours in some cultures.

The use of Rybczynski's term, "weekend", is especially related to the work days and days of non-working.  I have seen comments in British writing that imply the word and the concept are especially American.  When thinking about the week, the subject of modern industrialization comes up. Farming, especially work on fields of plants, naturally relates to sunrise and sunset, time when one can see better.  Industry tends to modify the day into one that begins at a given hour on the clock, when the factory whistle blows or the school day begins.  Of course, that idea relates to having a clock, whatever that is, and being able to use it.   

My life tends to be strongly related to the day of the week.  I know the names of the days and I can recite them in the order used.  You might think that I could not be confused as to whether today is Saturday or the day before that or the day after.  When I was a kid, I knew I could look at the first page of the newspaper to figure out which day I was in.  Now, my paper, my computer, my cellphone, my smartphone, …… all tell me.  I tend to spend time on the web page of Time.gov but I can't seem to find the day of the week or the date there.

Time markers

I didn't get a blog post written yesterday.  That happens once in a while.  I resort to a clipboard, scrap paper and a pencil then.  We have many pens of different sorts, even of different colors but I am trained in on a pencil for making notes.  As a guy who roams the planet and sometimes other places in his imagination, the first job of the pencil is to note what is up right now right here.  I am listening to Professor Hope Jahren read her book "Lab Girl" where she uses arresting poetic language to discuss trees, vines and other plants.  She has made me fully aware that the back lawn and prairie plants and trees are all at work while I jot notes.  There are so many plants right in view that I can't possibly really be aware of all they are doing.  So, it is always a sampling, a conglomeration of what I notice, what I remember and what I anticipate.

This is the beginning of the Labor Day weekend in the US.  The end of May includes the Memorial Day weekend with Memorial Day aimed at honoring the lives given by American armed forces in defense of the country and often expanded to honor other lives sacrificed in such activities as fire-fighting and policing.  The beginning of September includes Labor Day, aimed at honoring the workers who keep our society going.  We sometimes consider the two holidays, always placed on Mondays, to mark the fore and aft of the summer season.

When I think of the days of the week and their various personalities, I remember the book "Waiting for the Weekend" by Witold Rybczynski, an American architect and writer. If you are a fan of the tv show "Downton Abbey", you may remember the Duchess (played by Maggie Smith) is not always a fan of Americanisms and focuses on the American word "weekend" as an example of questionable language.  Rybczynski makes clear that much of the human population (but quite possibly less than half) went through a big change from agriculture-based living to industrial-commercial based living over the last 300 years or so.  The invention of "jobs", "employment" and the "work week" allowed the older 7-day rotation of the days of a "week" to be laid down on top of the week of days named for Nordic gods, the Hebrew Sabbath and Roman months.  

So, if you typically work Monday to Friday but have a holiday on Monday, give a thought to all the days before and after the invention of our calendars and markers.  They enable us to remember and celebrate and appreciate events in the continuous flow of our lives.

What day will Christmas fall on this year?

 

What could be simpler?  You are arrested and thrown into solitary.  You know you will lose track of the days so you may a note on the wall, maybe with a little blood or something of the current day and time.  You note each succeeding day, too.  You have a little calendar.  Pretty straightforward.

 

Calendars are tricky.  They are simple and they aren’t.  There are at least nine widely used calendar systems today.  Plus several more that have been shelved, such as the one instituted by the French during their revolution.

 

In 1965, I was required to take a 1 credit course with the other fellows on NDEA scholarships.  The idea was to learn to use Fortran, a computer language.  None of us had seen a computer but we knew it was an advanced machine.  The one we got to use had something like a memory of 32K, so small that probably no object with memory today has one that little.  Early on, we got a tour of the computer center where we would deposit our programs for the operator to run on the computer, big decks of punched cards with one command per card.  Nobody cared what the problem was.  The course was to be about using Fortran.  The instructor made it simple.  He wanted to be able to give us two dates and have our program state the number of days between them.

 

Researching the problem, we discovered that advisors to the Pope informed him several centuries back that the calendar of the day was out of whack and needed to be adjusted.  He declared that such and such a day would officially be followed by a day about two weeks into the future.  There were riots.  People wanted their days back.  We tried to take that change into consideration.  Eventually, we demonstrated enough knowledge and impatience that after three years running, we got our 1 credit. We never tried to deal with millennia before the common era and such.

 

Lynn and I did read “Waiting for the Weekend” by Witold Rybczynski, a versatile professor of architecture.  He gives some sense of the struggle to get people to stop rising with the sun and come to work at the appointed hour during the Industrial Revolution.

 

I thought my email program was for sending and receiving emails until I considered switching to the free Mozilla email called Thunderbird.  Then, I realized that Lynn and I used the calendar to remind us of events and appointments.  I tried using the free but rather aggressive Google calendar but we are still using our standby.  Retirement brings lots of freedom and choices but that puts more strain than ever on the calendar since one never knows what tomorrow is scheduled for without looking it up.

 

 

Dissolution or the next step?

I enjoyed Witold Rybczynski's "Waiting for the Weekend" and his discussion of the political, personal and technical difficulties in getting our citizens in the habit of going to work each day.  It wasn't easy to go from an agricultural life of hard work done on your own time to getting to a workplace by 9 and staying until 5.  Humans have not always had a modern industrial schedule,  I imagine many don't have one now.  

In fact, the idea of a job, of employment, seems to be a fairly recent invention limited to just industrialized countries.  I imagine shopkeepers all over the world have somewhat set and  public hours.  But when a person loses his job, the plant closes, the factory is moved to another state, then it is back to the old situation of being on your own.  You might have unemployment benefits for a while and some of them are only available if you can document that you have found some job openings and have applied to fill them.  What if there are no jobs to be found?  In the Depression, the iconic solution was to sell apples on the street corner.  

Today, we have soup kitchens, homeless shelters, food pantries .  Those who feel that the lazy grasshopper is morally deficient while the busy ant and the industrious squirrel are the models for all animals sometimes express suspicions that some people don't really try to find work.  Maybe they live on welfare, government attempts to keep people from starving to death.

But when you think about it, accepting free food instead of committing oneself to a job doing what you don't like, or what is boring or dangerous -- that might be a rational choice.  Perhaps as the world gets wealthier, there will be enough food, donated tv's and cars, blankets and housing that many people will decide to philosophically elect a simple, basic life supported by society.  Perhaps the moral pressure to make a living will dissipate and few will accept employment.  If little needs to be done for all to live, that might be the majority's choice.