Is Our Calendar a Ruin or a Home?

There are at least two ways of looking at a haunted house

I want to talk about time and habit and how we make sense of the world. So I’ll talk about an old house.

A house makes space habitable the way that a calendar makes time habitable. Each protects us from the worst, and allows us to enjoy the more pleasant elements of each. But time is slippery. It’s hard to think about. We’re much better with space. So instead of thinking about a calendar directly, let’s try to think about it as a house.

A little like a horror movie

You inherit a house from a relative, someone you met a few times, but didn’t know well. The house is gorgeous, full of ornate woodwork, and situated on a low hill. There was some bottleneck in that branch of the family and so the house went to you. The place is in decent shape, and fully furnished. What a coup!

Of course, it seems to be haunted. Or maybe you just don’t understand the decor. There are a lot of macabre patterns, faces grimacing in agony, carved into the bannisters, wainscoting and other details. Some of the chairs and lamps seem downright monstrous.

The backstory

As anyone who has ever swapped out screens for storm windows knows, a house is in regular need of adjustment, adaptation and repairs.

So it is with a calendar. For one thing, you need to add a day every four years, or else the calendar drifts out of step with the seasons before very long.

There’s more, of course, but you forget. Someone warned you about the trick with the boiler and a concern with the gutters and something else when you moved in. But you forget what. It was all written down somewhere, on index cards in an old tin that you put in a box in the basement. And while you remember some of the warnings sounding pretty important, the details escape you.

Sometimes these concerns reappear at night, when the house makes odd sounds.

A clean, modern look

The calendar is certainly an antique. But no one wants to modernize it. People are generally about as enthused about replacing their calendar as they are about replacing their sewer systems. The upgrades seem ineffectual, bordering on negligible - calling a month or a day one thing or another is pretty arbitrary no matter how you do it.

In their revolution, the French tried to replace the calendar. About two hundred years later, Pol Pot followed suit, sort of. It’s rarely worth spilling the necessary blood to change a calendar, except when the blood is already flowing in rivers.