The Morning: The year ahead
Good morning. The new year is spread out ahead of us, an empty calendar. What meaning will we give to it?
Clock workFour days into the year and it's all possibility right now. You have an idea of how things will go — what you're looking forward to, what's going to be challenging — but you're working off archival material. Memory and experience, educated guesses. "2025 is going to be very difficult for me," a friend said matter-of-factly the other night, before ticking off all the things she had to do this year: taking her business to a new stage, considering a move. To me, these things sounded exciting, interesting — the fascinating content of someone else's life. We're all sitting here with the same year's worth of days in front of us now, the same calendar. What activities and events will we fill it with? How will we greet the material of our days? What meaning will we give to it? I recently saw Christian Marclay's installation "The Clock" at MoMA. It's a 24-hour montage of thousands of clips from movies and shows, each featuring a clock, a watch, a line of dialogue or other timepiece. The film is synchronized with the actual time, so every scene depicts the moment at which you're watching it, making "The Clock" a functioning timepiece in itself. You're watching a movie, but you're also watching a clock, for hours on end. The museum stayed open for 24 hours on Dec. 21 for a special solstice showing of "The Clock," from 7 p.m. Saturday to 7 p.m. Sunday. On my way there Saturday night, I noticed myself rushing: It was 8 p.m., I was late! But then I stopped. It didn't really matter when I arrived. People would be coming and going throughout the screening all night and into the following day. Here was an invitation to reconsider how I thought about time. "The Clock," like real time, isn't a performance with a beginning and end. It's happening whether you're there or not. You show up or you don't. You pay attention or you don't. You can't do it wrong. Sitting in the audience as three, four, five hours elapsed and somehow my attention never wavered, I considered this proposition again. Maybe you could do it wrong. Should I be paying attention to the plot of each clip, the characters and dialogue, or should I be paying attention to the timepieces? 11:22, 11:23, did I miss the clock on the screen showing 11:24 because I was trying to figure out what movie that last scene was from? (I'd discover afterward there was an entire wiki devoted to "The Clock" with each clip's provenance identified — 11:24 includes scenes from "Shanghai Knights," "Malice in Wonderland" and "Se7en.") Can you do time wrong, by paying either too much attention to its passing, or not enough? "The Clock" forces you to meditate on time, the way we compulsively turn the consecutive scenes of our lives into a narrative, project a cause and effect onto everything that happens, assume everything has meaning and decide if that meaning is positive or negative. We're the artists and architects of our own lives, surveying the day or year ahead and trying to figure out what story we're going to tell. Is this going to be a good year? Is it going to be hard? Who decides? I stayed at "The Clock" until I started to doze off and dream some time Sunday morning. Marclay supports falling asleep during the film: "That's what you're supposed to do — let go and absorb it and feel like you're part of this thing," he told my colleague Marc Tracy. If I had remembered that, I might have stayed longer. Instead I stumbled out during the wee hours of the first day of winter into Midtown Manhattan. That was two weeks ago. In the time since, the sun has risen and set 13 times, one year ended and another began. I've been trying to pay attention to time, but not too closely, to notice that it's passing without getting too attached. This year is spread out before us, lots penciled in but nothing for certain. It could be difficult, as my friend predicted for herself. And, in the words of a Morning reader who wrote in to offer their best advice — the question mark to me is what makes this good advice, as if the idea of things not being terrible is a revelation — "It could be great?" For more
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