A good book beginning; clocks and time

I've started The Dubious Hills by pameladean, and even just a few pages in, I find it wonderful in ways that are difficult to articulate. There's the intimate scope: the focal character, Arry, lives in a very small community, where everyone has been intimately connected all her life. Partly it's the small details of that life--milk spilled on the floor for cats to lap up, hair cut to get rid of burrs (a necessity I remember from my own childhood). But a bigger reason is the way people understand and speak about things in the book, and therefore how it's conveyed to us, the readers:

According to Halver, today was the first day of May in the four-hundredth year since doubt descended. According to Wim, it was the second hour after dawn. But since dawn in its wandering way moved about, back and forth over the same small span of hours like a child looking for a dropped button, some of the leisured scholars at Heathwill Library (according to Mally they were leisured, according to Halver they were scholars, according to Sune there was indeed a structure called Heathwill Library) had named all the hours of the day from their own heads without regard to the shifting of the sun.

This lineage of information, and transmitting it with the authorities appended, I love.

I blame it for inspiring the following thoughts on clocks, analog clocks:

Analog clocks are like sportscasters or simultaneous translators: they're telling you about a thing (the passage of time) as it's happening, and in the exact amount of time it happens in. It takes a second hand the whole of a second to tell you that a second's gone by, and it take a minute hand a whole minute to tell you a minute's gone by. Analog clocks are like a v-e-r-y gross-grained book of all things that are happening right now: no specifics, but the biggest possible picture: time is passing. I remember hearing somewhere that time measurement is the weirdest of measurements, because when the measurement is accomplished, the time is lost. This doesn't happen when you measure the weight of flour or the distance between New York and Los Angeles. Imagine if those things were gone if you once measured them. Imagine if the only way to know about the weight of flour were to eat it.

And with that thought, I'm back to work. But by the way, both The Dubious Hills and Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which had been out of print, are now in print again. Details here.