Thing Review!

How are you doing Clock of the Long Now? I don’t even know what punctuation to use when referring to…you…thing…clock contraption. All I know is that I got to Powell’s City of Books early to get good seats to hear Michael Chabon, one of my favorite writers – living. It was four years ago and it was a strangely sunny day in Portland. And you know what Chabon read? An article he had just gotten published about his son’s reaction to your someday existence. There are more than a few moments when I realize that I’m not that educated. I don’t know the Greeks beyond Zeus and Hera and forgot the plots of most of Shakespeare’s plays beyond Macbeth, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. But, Michael Chabon is an extraordinarily smart man and has cool hair. During the reading at Powell’s I was one degree of separation (okay, two, since I sat in the second row back) from his genius energy power. He read, “The Omega Glory” and I cried at the end for just one second and then ran home to Google what the Clock of the Long Now really was. And it’s true. In Nevada, there’s the 10,000 year clock being manufactured to record the future.

At the end of every one of my creative writing courses that I taught at University of Phoenix, I would hand out copies of “The Omega Glory” and turn the overhead projector on to the Long Now website and I would watch what would happen. Many students would sigh and be frustrated at their lack of comprehending much of Chabon’s vocabulary but others would be able to overcome their limited vocabularies to see to the point of the article. One time, I had an ex military man in my class (strong, burly, outspoken and confident) wipe a few tears from his eyes. The class grew silent for a moment after they had finished reading and complaining and he said, “Amy, I want to thank you.”  And I knew exactly what he meant and had felt the same way after I ran out of Powell’s to get to my computer because the future is well…everything. Our day-to-day ability to feel our impact on the future is so completely buried in the minutiae of grocery lists, failed work projects, crying babies, back pain or lovers that never called. 

Thank YOU, 10,000 year clock. For reminding me to look up.