I. Gravity's Rainbow and Temporal Bandwidth

 

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is a sprawling, challenging novel set in the final months of World War II. It follows an enormous cast of characters amid V-2 rocket attacks, black-market intrigues, and surreal conspiracies in Europe. The book has a reputation for difficulty, it interweaves advanced science, occult symbolism, dark humor, and musical interludes. Yet it's widely hailed as a postmodern masterpiece that captures the paranoia and technological dread of the post-war era lithub.com.

 

The very title Gravity's Rainbow evokes a haunting image: the arc of a rocket across the sky, a "rainbow" produced not by sunlight but by the fire of combustion and the pull of gravity. Pynchon's rainbow is beautiful but deadly; a spectrum of destruction. Gravity ensures the rocket must fall.

 

This tension between vivid color and fatal physics symbolizes the book's central concern with modern technology and control: even the loveliest illusions of progress (the rainbow) are governed by inescapable natural laws (gravity), leading to inevitable consequences.

 

One of Pynchon's most memorable ideas in Gravity's Rainbow is the concept of "temporal bandwidth." In the novel, a character named Kurt Mondaugen propounds what he calls Mondaugen's Law: "Personal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth." He defines temporal bandwidth as "the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar 'Δt' considered as a dependent variable." Crucially, "The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are." en.wikiquote.org

 

In other words, a person's sense of identity ("personal density") depends on how much past and future they carry with them in the present moment. A wider temporal bandwidth – rich memories, deep historical context, future hopes – gives a person substance and resilience. A narrow "Now," by contrast, leaves one thin and fragile, easier to unmoor.

 

Pynchon even suggests that if the Now becomes sufficiently narrow, "you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even ... what you're doing here" lithub.com. In the novel, the protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, experiences exactly this: as the conspiracies around him intensify, Slothrop's sense of self and time disintegrate. He loses the continuity of memory and purpose and eventually "fades away" as a coherent character lithub.com.

 

Pynchon implies that someone with a vanishingly small present – cut off from both past and future – becomes vulnerable to manipulation and control, even to erasure. It's a cautionary metaphor for modern life: if we allow our "Now" to contract to the fleeting second-hand of a clock or the blink of a notification, we risk becoming as insubstantial as Slothrop – easily controlled, easily lost.

 

This idea resonates far beyond literary fiction. Pynchon's darkly comic vision of a "tenuous" person, all immediate sensation and no memory or foresight, speaks to the modern condition of information overload and temporal disorientation. Gravity's Rainbow's very form – non-linear, entropic, obsessed with cycles and repetitions – challenges the reader to broaden their temporal awareness. Even without grasping all the novel's mysteries, Mondaugen's Law stands out as a clear insight: to be fully human, one must live in a thick present, one that embraces remembrance and anticipation.

 

Gravity's Rainbow implicitly warns that the technical systems of modernity – from the mechanisms of the war machine to the synchronized tick of industrial clocks – tend to chop time into narrow instants. The novel's closing image of an audience in a movie theater, poised to be annihilated by a falling rocket lithub.com, suggests a society mesmerized by the moment of spectacle and oblivious to the larger arc of history, "gravity" is pulling them along.

 

In the context of temporal bandwidth, the book asks: what happens if a whole culture's sense of Now shrinks? Pynchon's answer is sobering: we become easier to command, and ultimately we may share the fate of a rocket on its downward arc, unable to alter course.

 

II. The Industrialization and Rationalization of Time

 

How did our sense of time become so thin in the first place? To answer that, we must look at the industrialization of time over the past two centuries – the process by which human time was quantified, standardized, and commodified. Before the 19th century, time was essentially a local, sun-defined phenomenon.

 

Towns kept their own time by the sun's position at noon, and life was attuned to the natural cycles of day and season. The industrial revolution shattered that pastoral rhythm. Railroads, factories, and global markets demanded uniform, precise time reckoning, and the transition was tumultuous.

 

A vivid example is the problem of railroad scheduling in the 1800s. In the United States, before standardized time zones, each city's clock could differ – Boston might be several minutes "ahead" of New York, which was ahead of Cleveland, and so on. Trains carrying passengers and freight across long distances faced chaos in coordinating schedules. Worse, on single-track lines, "the proliferation of trains and [local] times made train wrecks more common," since two trains might mis-time a meet and collide news.harvard.edu.

 

The period 1831–1853 saw at least 97 train collisions attributed in part to inconsistent timing (news.harvard.edunews.harvard.edu).

 

One notorious accident in 1853, on a blind curve near Pawtucket, Rhode Island, killed 14 people – the result of "a reckless conductor and a faulty watch," in the words of a contemporary report (news.harvard.edu). Public outcry over such "train wrecks" (a phrase that entered metaphorical language to mean any chaotic disaster) pushed railway companies toward a radical solution: adopt a single, standard time.

 

Standardization began regionally – for instance, by 1849, the New England railroads agreed to run on "Boston time" distributed via telegraph from the Harvard College Observatory (news.harvard.edu). Eventually, the momentum for synchronization went global.

 

In 1884, an International Meridian Conference was held in Washington, D.C., with delegates from 25 nations, to establish a universal baseline for timekeeping. The conference selected the Greenwich meridian in London as the world's prime meridian – in effect, declaring that the global day would officially begin and that the world's clocks would be set at Greenwich (en.wikipedia.org).

 

This was the birth of Standard Time as a worldwide system. However, the adoption of standard time was not instantaneous or universal. The conference recommended 24-hourly time zones, but it did not immediately mandate how nations should implement them thegreenwichmeridian.org.

 

In practice, it took decades for society to adjust fully. Britain had already moved toward using Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) by mid-century, but it wasn't until 1880 that GMT became the legal time across the UK (en.wikipedia.org). In the United States, railroads voluntarily coordinated five continental time zones in 1883, the famous "day of two noons" when cities reset their clocks at once (en.wikipedia.org).

 

Yet US federal law did not officially establish national time zones until 1918 (en.wikipedia.org). So, between the idea and the reality of world standard time lay a generation of gradual change. By the early 20th century, though, the deed was done: the hours of the day had been abstracted from nature and yoked to the needs of industry and empire. No longer did "noon" mean the sun at its zenith in your town; it meant 12:00 according to a global grid, whether the sun was there or not.

 

Standardized clock time brought obvious benefits: safer railroads, coordinated business and communication, and a sense that the world was more connected. But it also exacted a cultural and psychological price. The historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford famously argued that "the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age." bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com The steam engine powered factories and locomotives, but the clock powered the social machine of industrial civilization, providing a new tempo and order for human activity.

 

As Mumford observed, once clocks and factory whistles governed the day, timekeeping turned into time-serving, time-accounting, time-rationing; "Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions." bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com In other words, what came to matter was not the seasonal or spiritual time of old, but the metronomic ticking of seconds as units of productivity. By parceling out uniform minutes, the clock made "synchronizing the actions of men" possible on a mass scale bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com – a prerequisite for factory shift work, military discipline, and bureaucratic administration.

 

Mumford points out that the mechanical clock preceded other engines of industrialization by centuries (the first weight-driven clocks appeared in medieval Europe). The monasteries of the Middle Ages, in fact, were early adopters of strict hourly schedules – ringing bells for the canonical hours of prayer – which instilled a habit of regularity mbpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com. By the 14th century, city clocks were striking the hours, and by the 17th, clocks were accurate enough to chop time into ever smaller segments bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com.

 

This prolonged incubation meant that by the 1800s, people were primed to accept the idea that time is a uniform, context-independent commodity.

 

The clock "dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences", as Mumford writes (bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com). In place of sunrise, hunger, fatigue, or harvest season, the new order offered seconds, minutes, hours – each identical, abstract, and empty until filled with work or activity. Whereas "throughout the year the days are of uneven duration" and human rhythms vary, mechanical time is "strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants" bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com

 

It is, in short, "homogeneous" time – the very thing Bergson and other philosophers would later criticize (more on that in a moment). Under industrial capitalism, this homogeneous time became the standard medium of life: the currency in which we budget our days. (Benjamin Franklin's proverb "time is money" became literally true when workers began earning wages by the hour.)

 

Nowhere was the conversion of time into money more explicit than in Taylorism, the system of "scientific management" pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century. Taylor took the clock mindset to its logical extreme. He famously conducted time-and-motion studies in factories, using a stopwatch to break every job into seconds and every worker's motion into measured segments. Taylor's goal was to eliminate all wasted time and motion, making the worker as efficient as a machine. As Britannica summarizes, "He broke each job down into its individual motions, analyzed these to determine which were essential, and timed the workers with a stopwatch. With unnecessary motion eliminated, the worker, following a machine-like routine, became far more productive." britannica.com

 

In practice, this meant a man with a stopwatch (or even a slow-motion camera) would stand over a laborer, clocking how long it took him to, say, shovel coal or assemble a part, and then demand changes until the task was optimized. The "weaponization" of time in Taylor's method is unmistakable: seconds and minutes are wielded to maximize output, with no regard for the human's natural pace or satisfaction. Every moment not spent in optimal work is treated as a kind of theft – "stolen" time.

 

Scientific management spread these ideas widely. By the early 20th century, the stopwatch – or more broadly, clock time – had become an instrument of extraction. Employers paid for an hour of labor and expected sixty minutes of effort in return; managers disciplined workers who were "wasting time." Punctuality, once a minor virtue, became a cardinal one. Lateness or idleness was a moral failing. In our own era, digital productivity tools and the incessant time-stamping of our online lives are descendants of the same legacy: they reflect an underlying belief that time's highest value lies in being a quantifiable resource – something to be measured, managed, and optimized.

 

All of this marks a profound shift from phenomenological time (time as humans experience it) to rationalized time (time as clocks and algorithms measure it). Before industrialization, a person's sense of time was thick with context: morning meant the light of dawn and the first chores; autumn meant the harvest season and a nip in the air; a year might be remembered in terms of events ("the year of the great flood" or "when the corn was plentiful") rather than a number.

 

This is not to romanticize the pre-modern past – life was shorter and often harsher then – but to note that time was embedded in natural cycles and human rhythms. Modern synchronized time ripped time out of these contexts and made it an external metric. As Mumford eloquently put it, under mechanical time, the hours "could be divided, filled up, and even expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments"

bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com

 

Time became a container, an empty grid laid over life, rather than a flow felt in the pulse of organic existence. The paradox – recognized by workers in the early factories and by critics ever since – is that this new regime, while efficient, impoverished our lived experience of time. By disciplining time to the clock, we narrowed our bandwidth to what the clock could display. The standard analog clock shows only the most minimal "present": a fleeting second-hand tick or a digital moment that is here and gone.

 

We came to "measure our bandwidth" and our very selves with a device designed to keep our attention on micro-slices of time. As one commentator quipped, "We already have timepieces that show us how to be on time… These are timepieces that show us how to be in time." wired.com In other words, the ordinary clock is an excellent tool for scheduling and coordination, but it does nothing to help us feel the depth or breadth of the moment we are living in. If anything, it keeps us "off balance with time ... looking at it in just one sort of linear, industrialized way" and "totally missing the whole natural world." wired.com

 

We have, as Pynchon might say, very high temporal resolution but very low temporal bandwidth. And the consequences are evident: frantic productivity, anxiety about time running out, and a culture that valorizes speed over reflection. "Right now we're living in the long-term effects of short-term thinking," as one observer notes, and "I don't think it's possible for us to commonly think long term if the way that we tell time is with a short-term device that just shows the seconds, minutes, and hours." wired.com In short, we've built a world optimized for the clock, and now we are struggling to rediscover a sense of duration, continuity, and presence that the clock era squeezed out.

 

III. Duration, Eastern Thought, and Cyclical Time

 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the dominance of mechanized clock-time reached its peak, philosophers and visionaries began pushing back. One of the most influential was the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson introduced the concept of la durée – duration – to capture time as humans actually experience it, in contrast to the chopped-up time of science. In his works (such as Time and Free Will (1889) and Creative Evolution (1907)), Bergson drew a sharp line between real, lived time and abstract, spatialized time. There are, Bergson said, "two possible conceptions of time, the one free from all alloy, the other surreptitiously bringing in the idea of space."

muogbomichael.blogspot.com

 

Real time (temps vécu) is not a series of mathematical instants laid out like points on a line, but an indivisible flow – "continuous, indivisible and irreversible", a qualitative unfolding of lifemuogbomichael.blogspot.com. Bergson argued that when we conceptualize time (for example, reading a clock or marking a timeline), we tend to imagine it as a homogeneous ribbon of units – essentially treating time like space. This, he said, is a kind of illusion or "ghost of space" haunting our thinkingibiblio.orgibiblio.org. In reality, according to Bergson, time is not made of units at all. It is "the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present," a ceaseless merging of what was into what is johnstoszkowski.substack.com.

 

If that sounds abstract, Bergson gave a simple analogy: listen to the notes of a melody. If you truly listen, you don't hear each note in isolation; you hear them in the context of each other, as a dynamic whole. The note that sounded a moment ago is still somehow present in your consciousness as the next note sounds. They "permeate one another, imperceptibly organize themselves into a whole, and bind the past to the present," forming a melody. muogbomichael.blogspot.com

 

That is what Bergson calls pure duration: "the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states." ibiblio.org In duration, the past lives on in the present (as memory), and the future is felt as a tending or an expectation, all interwoven in the thick fabric of the now. This idea was a direct challenge to the clock-time view. Bergson believed the dominance of science and industry had led people to mistake the measurement of time for time itself, losing sight of the rich inner experience of duration. Clock-time and lived time, he insisted, "were entirely different." theparisreview.org

 

Around the same time, other cultural currents were challenging Western notions of linear time. Thinkers and artists increasingly engaged with Eastern philosophies of time, which often emphasized cyclicality, the eternal return, or the illusory nature of time. In many Eastern traditions, time is not seen as an arrow stretching from a singular Creation to an apocalyptic End (as in the Judeo-Christian timeline), but rather as a wheel or a rhythm. Hindu cosmology, for instance, posits vast cycles called yugas and kalpas. Time in Hindu thought is effectively infinite and cyclical – the universe itself is created, destroyed, and reborn endlessly. According to Hindu scriptures, "time is infinite with a cyclic universe, where the current universe was preceded and will be followed by an infinite number of universes." The eternal time (kāla) "repeats general events ranging from a moment to the lifespan of the universe" en.wikipedia.org.

 

In this view, every moment contains echoes of prior cycles, and even the gods are bound to the turning of ages. Buddhist and Taoist conceptions of time also tend to deemphasize strict linear progression.

 

Buddhism, for example, speaks of "beginningless time" – since there is no first moment, the cosmos has no ultimate temporal boundary, only the ceaseless flow of cause and effect. The Buddha used the image of a circle (the Wheel of Life) to illustrate samsāra, the repeating cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; "a circle has no beginning or end", and likewise sentient beings have been revolving through time beyond reckoning dharmawheel.net. In Daoist thought, time is often implicit in the natural transformations of yin and yang – cyclical alternations that harmonize with the seasons and the flow of qi. What all these perspectives share is a fundamentally different intuition of time than the Western industrial one.

 

They are phenomenological and contextual rather than abstract and uniform. Time is tied to events (the ripening of fruit, the turning of heavens, the succession of lives) rather than an empty container in which events happen. There is also a greater tolerance for the present as something extended, not just a knife-edge. For example, many Eastern meditation practices involve sinking deeply into the present moment – but "the moment" in these contexts is not a split-second so much as a spacious now-ness, a state of complete attention that can endure for minutes or hours.

 

For a Western person in the 21st century, living by the clock yet intrigued by these other notions, the challenge becomes how to integrate a richer sense of time into daily life. The industrial world isn't going to vanish; one still has to catch one's train on time. But one can augment the brute clock with gentler temporal cues.

 

Scott Thrift, the filmmaker-turned-designer we're focusing on, faced exactly this challenge in conceptualizing his work. Thrift's journey was in part an intellectual one: through his reading and global travels, he absorbed ideas from Bergson and from Eastern philosophies about reclaiming a more humane time. But it was a simple, personal epiphany that crystallized these influences into a question. As Thrift tells it, he realized one day: "How can we live in the moment if the moment changes every second?" thepresent.is.

 

This deceptively straightforward question carries profound implications. We are often told to "live in the present" or "be here now." Yet, as Thrift noted, what we call "the present" in modern parlance is virtually no time at all – just the latest tick on the second hand, evaporating almost as soon as it arrives.

 

If your idea of "now" is only a flash between past and future, how can you ever live in it? By the time you recognize it, it's gone. Thrift describes the conventional present as a "hairline fracture between the past and the future, never lasting long enough to matter." thepresent.is In pondering this, he essentially re-invented Mondaugen's Law for himself: the default setting of Western time-consciousness is a razor-thin now, a narrow bandwidth that starves us of meaning. When Thrift's question "shattered the default idea of the present moment," it opened up the possibility that the present could instead be something much "wider, thicker, and more humane."

 

If a second is too short to live in, why not a minute, an hour, a day, or a year? What if the moment were not a fleeting point but a field – a rich duration we could inhabit? In effect, Thrift set out to enlarge the temporal bandwidth of the everyday present. He wasn't the first to dream of this (Bergson, after all, wanted people to experience duration directly), but Thrift had an angle that was concrete and practical: he would design an instrument to help do it.

 

IV. The Present: Design, Philosophy, and Temporal Bandwidth in Practice

 

The origin story of Thrift's signature creation – The Present – is almost mythical in its simplicity. In January 2004, Scott Thrift moved to New York City. He was a young filmmaker with an artist's eye and a philosopher's streak. Thrift spent his first year in New York on a quixotic quest: he tried to capture "one image" that would represent the totality of the city.

 

New York, of course, is in perpetual motion – a blur of people, skyscrapers, lights, and seasons. Freezing it into a single frame felt impossible. Thrift found himself constantly a step behind reality; by the time he clicked the shutter, the moment had moved on. In 2005, after many months, he had a revelation: perhaps the task was impossible not because he was failing as a photographer, but because time itself was the issue.

 

No single photograph could contain New York because New York is time unfolding – a cityscape of processes, not a static object. Thrift realized he didn't need a better camera or a higher vantage point; he needed a new way to see time. The question coalesced in his mind: "How can we live in the moment if the moment changes every second?" thepresent.is.

 

The problem was the frame rate of reality. Instead of chasing a perfect snapshot, what if he made the frame itself larger – large enough to hold the flux?

 

That spring, Thrift sketched an idea for a different kind of timepiece. What if a clock measured a year instead of an hour? Imagine a single hand that takes 365 days to complete one revolution around the dial. Such a clock would be a dynamic portrait of the year's progression rather than the day's. It would move so slowly you could hardly see it move – the opposite of a ticking second hand. Instead of numbers or hour marks, the dial could be abstract, perhaps a wash of colors representing the changing seasons.

 

Thrift intuited that this was the temporal "photograph" he had been looking for: not a still photo at all, but an instrument that would reveal the whole living year at a glance. He named it The Present, a bold assertion that the present moment is not just this second – it's all of this, the whole cycle we're in.

 

Over the next few years, Thrift refined the concept, and in 2012, he officially founded The Present as a company to bring the year clock to life (thepresent.is). The design he arrived at is elegantly simple but deeply symbolic. The Present clock has one hand and no numbers.

 

The hand's full circle corresponds to one year, so at any given point, the hand's position tells you which fraction of the annual cycle today is in. The dial is a continuous gradient of color: it flows through a spectrum from deep blue into green, yellow, orange, and red, then back to blue. These colors are not arbitrary; they map onto the seasons. At the winter solstice (around late December), the dial shows a midnight blue; as spring arrives, the tones lighten into greens; high summer brings golden yellows; autumn deepens into orange and crimson thepresent.is.

 

The cycle then closes back at wintry blue. There are no written labels for months or seasons on the face – one learns to intuit them from the colors and the hand's progression. Because the hand moves continuously (powered by a custom-engineered movement geared for a 365-day cycle), there is no ticking sound, no mechanical jerk.

 

The effect is of a gentle, silent sweep – time portrayed as a smooth flow rather than a series of jumps. Owners of The Present often describe it less as a clock and more as a piece of ambient art or a mirror of nature's rhythm. One user, Christopher Butler, noted that "every guest who has ever come and gone through our front door has commented on this clock... Once the novelty subsides, I know that regular guests get the same thing from it that I and my family do — a reminder: ... a memento mori, maybe; for me, a memento vitae." chrbutler.com.

 

Butler's word choice is telling: memento mori (Latin for "remember that you must die") is the old concept of an object that reminds us of life's brevity, whereas memento vivere ("remember to live") is Thrift's preferred framing – an object that reminds us to truly live in the time we have. chrbutler.com.

 

Figure: The Present – a one-year clock – reimagines the clock face as a vibrant circle of seasonal color. Its single hand makes a complete revolution only once per 365 days. By slowing down timekeeping, The Present turns the "present moment" from a hairline tick into an expansive, ever-evolving field.

 

Every aspect of The Present's design was chosen to counter the pressures of industrial time. For example, the absence of numerals or minute markers is deliberate: it prevents the urge to use the clock for scheduling or precision. You can't really "tell time" in the conventional sense with The Present – at least not to the minute or hour. Instead, you feel time. Thrift has said that our normal clocks make us see time as something we're constantly losing. thepresent.is

 

A glance at a clock often provokes stress: so much has passed, so little remains until X deadline. The Present, in contrast, has no numbers to subtract or anxiously count down. If anything, it de-centers the human agenda. Whether you're late for a meeting is not the clock's concern; the clock is showing you the season, the phase of Earth's journey around the sun. Subtly, this recenters the viewer's attention from the short term to the long term, from the personal to the cosmic (or at least the planetary). It widens your temporal bandwidth.

 

Instead of "3:45 PM on March 3," you see "early spring." Instead of an exacting to-do list of seconds, you get a diffuse sense of where you are in the year's broader narrative. This contextual present is thicker and richer: it contains echoes of the recent past (e.g., the winter behind us) and seeds of the coming future (e.g., the summer ahead). As one commentator put it, The Present "reminds us that there is always more than one kind of time" and that we can choose to place ourselves in a 'present' that lasts longer than a second. thepresent.is

 

Crucially, Thrift does not advocate abandoning standard clocks; instead, he aims to "introduce greater variety to the ways we use and tell time, with the holistic time of The Present offering a counterpoint to the segmented time of the regular clock." thepresent.isthepresent.is In other words, The Present is meant to enrich, not replace our temporal experience – to add a slow, natural scale alongside the fast, mechanical one.

 

Philosophically, Thrift's project hits several profound notes. It's a meditation on eternity, disguised as a household object. A traditional clock can sometimes feel like a memento mori – every tick marking a bit of your life irretrievably gone. The Present, in contrast, functions as what Thrift calls a memento vivere – a reminder to live. Because its hand moves so slowly, it invites a kind of calm contemplation. Stand in front of it, and nothing much changes; a minute later, the hand is practically in the same place.

 

This stillness has a paradoxical effect: it can make you more aware of change elsewhere – in yourself, or in nature outside your window. One owner described it as "a token to pull us out of the hallucination of modernity and back into the reality of the turning earth, seasons, colors, and nature."  chrbutler.comchrbutler.com

 

The phrase "hallucination of modernity" is apt – the hallucination is that time is only what the clock says, that progress is linear, that rush and anxiety are normal. The Present, by sitting there quietly cycling through its hues, punctures that illusion. It gently asserts that time is not just the frantic race of Chronos (clock-time) but also the slow dance of Kairos (natural time). There is a subtle spiritual aspect to this. The continuous circle of The Present's dial carries an echo of the Zen or Taoist idea of the eternal now – a now that is boundless, without sharp division between past and future. The circle has no start or end; one season transforms into the next in an endless round.

 

In a sense, The Present offers a model of eternity without religious dogma. It's as close to "timelessness" as a timepiece can get: by depicting time as a cycle, it reassures us (perhaps even at an unconscious level) that the end of one cycle is simply the beginning of another. Winter will come again, but so will spring. Dusk gives way to dawn. Viewed this way, The Present clock is like a mask placed over the terrifying face of Time – not to obscure it, but to make it bearable, even beautiful, to behold.

 

Indeed, that idea of a "time mask" brings us to a striking connection Thrift made with a renowned writer, which we'll explore in the next section. But before that, one more analogy: consider how this year-clock contrasts with the rocket trajectory in Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's rocket (as discussed earlier) is a one-way trip – a parabola of doom culminating in an explosion. It's the embodiment of linear, goal-driven time (literally a weapon launched to meet an end).

 

The Present's motion, by contrast, is circular and benign. It goes nowhere in the sense of a final endpoint; its purpose is renewal. If the rocket is a metaphor for how modernity hurtles forward and falls, the year-clock is a counter-symbol, tracing a path of return and continual rebirth. One might say Thrift has taken the arc of Gravity's Rainbow and "rounded it out to form a circle," as one critic said of Pynchon's own thematic trajectory. lithub.comlithub.com.

 

In doing so, The Present collapses the distinction between past, present, future – they all coexist on the dial – and invites us to step off the runaway train of linear time, if only for a moment, and rest in a "long now."

V. László Krasznahorkai and "The Most Beautiful Time Mask of the World"

 

A fascinating chapter in the story of The Present involves the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai – a writer often described as "apocalyptic" or "metaphysical" in his treatment of time. (Notably, in 2025, Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in Literature, partly for his visionary exploration of temporal experience in novels.)

 

In 2016, Krasznahorkai was in New York City as a fellow at the New York Public Library. By chance one day, he wandered into the MoMA Design Store (the retail arm of the Museum of Modern Art). There, among the curated design objects, he saw The Present on display. The clock's uniqueness immediately struck him – here was a design capturing something he had been grappling with in prose: the idea of a present that contains all of time. Krasznahorkai was so moved that he asked the store staff for the creator's contact information. The MoMA forwarded this request to Scott Thrift.

 

When Thrift received word that László Krasznahorkai wanted to meet him, they arranged to meet at one of Manhattan's oldest cafés.

 

Thrift arrived, perhaps expecting a typical meet-and-greet.

 

Instead, László offered a gesture that left a lifelong impression: Krasznahorkai stood up and gave him a deep, formal bow – a full 90-degree, Japanese-style bow of respect. It was an almost otherworldly moment. Here was one of the world's great novelists, known for depicting time and eternity in his work, wordlessly honoring a young designer for his treatment of the same themes in another medium. Thrift was, by his own account, humbled to the core. The two conversed for hours about time, art, and existence. They found a kinship in each other's work – both were striving against the flattening of time in modern life, trying to recapture a sense of the sublime.

 

As their meeting concluded, Krasznahorkai presented Thrift with a gift: a signed copy of his novel Seiobo There Below (a book suffused with reflections on timelessness and the divine). In it, Krasznahorkai inscribed Thrift, calling The Present "the most beautiful time mask of the world." thepresent.is

 

This phrase is poetic and enigmatic, which is fitting for Krasznahorkai. By calling The Present a time mask, he was coining a concept: the clock as a mask that allows us to gaze at Time's otherwise blinding face. In many mythologies, a mask is a sacred object that enables communion with powerful forces or deities; it both reveals and conceals.

 

Here, Krasznahorkai implies that The Present makes the vastness of time, which might otherwise be terrifying (think of geological eons, or the endless void of eternity) – accessible to the human mind. The Present covers the face of deep time with colors and cycles we can relate to, thereby allowing us to look at it continuously, even calmly. It domesticates eternity into something not just comprehensible but beautiful.

 

Coming from an author whose sentences sometimes run on for pages, looping and circling to capture a sense of the infinite, this was high praise.

 

In homage to that encounter, when Thrift's daughter was born in 2024, he named her Lazlah (with a feminine spelling) – a personal testament to how much the exchange meant to him.

 

It's a remarkable footnote: an artist of time (Thrift) blessed by a storyteller of time (Krasznahorkai), each recognizing in the other the same devotion to expanding human temporal experience.

 

The Krasznahorkai episode also rooted The Present in a broader cultural context. It is not just a quirky design object or a clever gadget; one of the keenest contemporary minds on the subject recognized it as a work of art with profound significance.

 

Krasznahorkai's works often deal with the collapse of time or an overwhelming sense of now that contains all of history (for example, his novel Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming ends with an "ultimate moment" where past, present, and future fold into one). By bowing to Thrift and dubbing his clock the world's most beautiful time mask, Krasznahorkai essentially said: You have done something that literature, too, strives to do – you have found a form for the ineffable.

 

It was a gesture of validation that transcended an ordinary compliment. And for Thrift, who had poured nearly a decade of effort into The Present by that point (often under financial strain and uncertainty), it was like receiving a benediction from the universe. It meant that someone truly understood the clock's intent. No wonder Thrift considers that meeting one of the pinnacles of his journey.

VI. Ten Thousand Private Installations and the Vision for Public Time

 

From 2012 to today, The Present has gradually spread worldwide. Through small production runs, word of mouth, and a couple of successful Kickstarter campaigns, Thrift and his collaborators have sold more than 10,000 units of The Present (and its sibling designs) to people in over 50 countries. Each clock is in itself a self-contained art piece, a private installation of Thrift's concept in someone's home or office. Thrift likes to point out an intriguing fact: all these thousands of clocks synchronize to the same cycle.

 

Because they are all essentially set to the natural year (starting from the winter solstice, in the first edition's calibration), "wherever you are in the world, that hand is in the same place" on a given date, freundevonfreunden.com.

 

In essence, there is now a silent network of Present clocks around the globe, all moving in unison through the seasons. It's almost poetic: at any given moment, a schoolteacher in London, a tech worker in San Francisco, a monk in Seoul, and a family in Buenos Aires might all glance at their Present clock and see it pointing to, say, the golden-green of late spring. Unbeknownst to each other, they are subtly synchronized in a shared awareness of time beyond the clock. One could imagine it as a distributed public art installation – 10,000 points of light attuned to the same rhythm, an antidote to the fragmented time zones and frenetic timetables that usually dominate.

 

Encouraged by this quiet seeding of a new time consciousness in private spaces, Thrift's ambition has grown in recent years. He is now turning his attention to public installations of The Present. The idea is to move from private clocks you hang on your wall to larger, more communal versions installed in hospitals, universities, libraries, government buildings, and other civic spaces.

 

What would it mean to have a Present in a hospital lobby, for instance? Consider a large year clock mounted at the entrance to an oncology wing. Patients, families, and staff passing by would see the hand drifting through the full spectrum of the year. In a place often fraught with anxiety and uncertainty, this gentle visual of time's continuity could be grounding. It would be a reminder that outside the hospital walls, the seasons are turning, life is moving forward, and that today is part of a larger cycle – perhaps helping patients imagine a future season when they might be well.

 

In an oncology or hospice context, a year clock might also serve as a compassionate memento mori and memento vivere: it tacitly acknowledges life's finitude (only so many turns of the dial are given to any of us), yet it focuses on the beauty of each segment of the cycle, encouraging one to cherish the now.

 

In universities and schools, a Present installation could influence the mindset of students and educators. The semester calendar and the frantic pace of deadlines often rule academia. A year clock in a university library or student center might act as a visual antidote to burnout – a prompt to zoom out and remember the long view. Research projects, education itself, are marathons, not sprints. By reconnecting with natural time, students might feel subtly less "against the clock."

 

In government buildings or corporate headquarters, one can imagine The Present instilling a humbling perspective: quarterly earnings or election cycles are not the only rhythms that matter; there is also the Earth's cycle, environmental seasons, and the long-term responsibilities that extend beyond immediate polls or profits. It's a gentle rebuke to short-termism.

 

(One is reminded of the Long Now Foundation's 10,000-year clock project, which similarly aims to foster longer-term thinking. Thrift's approach is more modest and immediately practical, but philosophically aligned in wanting to lengthen our horizon.)

 

Thrift has spoken of these public clocks in terms of "temporal public health." He suggests that, just as we have public initiatives for physical and mental health, we might consider installing slower timepieces as a kind of public health infrastructure for time, addressing what some scholars call time poverty or temporal stress. In modern urban life, many people feel there is "never enough time," that life is a constant rush. This has real health effects: chronic stress can lead to anxiety, burnout, and a decreased capacity to plan for the future. A community that lacks a shared sense of enduring time may become short-sighted and fragmented.

 

By placing a slow, cyclical clock in communal spaces, Thrift believes we can anchor group consciousness in a healthier temporal frame. There is some tangential evidence for this idea in environmental design: studies have shown that disrupted circadian rhythms (day-night cycles) can compromise the recovery of hospitalized patients hfmmagazine.com, and many hospitals are now incorporating circadian lighting and clock systems to improve patient outcomes.

 

That is about daily rhythms of light and dark; by analogy, one could posit that disconnection from larger natural cycles (like seasons) might harm our collective well-being, and that reintroducing those cues could be beneficial. A year clock in a public space would function as a secular stained-glass window.

 

Instead of depicting saints or allegories, it wordlessly teaches patience, continuity, and connection to nature's time. Over months and years, people who regularly pass by it might internalize a less harried sense of time. It could become a local tradition, for instance, to mark the exact day the clock's hand hits the top (say, the spring equinox or the new year) with a little ceremony – a gentle collective reminder of time's passage that isn't tied to consumerist holidays or fiscal quarters, but to the Earth's own turning.

 

On an even broader scale, one can envision global public installations of The Present – say, a prominent one at the United Nations headquarters, or in international airports, or other crossroads of humanity. Such clocks would not show local time but planetary season. They could stand as symbols of our shared temporal fate on a warming planet.

 

They would tell us, for example, that it's late summer in the Northern Hemisphere and late winter in the Southern – a fact that might spur reflection on agricultural cycles, migrations, or the global distribution of resources. In an era when climate change is scrambling traditional seasons, a device that draws attention to the natural yearly cycle could also provoke helpful questions: What will this slice of the circle look like 50 years from now? Are the colors (metaphorically) fading or shifting as our environment changes? Thus, The Present, in public form, might also evolve into a tool for environmental consciousness.

 

There is a poignant phrase Thrift uses: Installing these clocks is a way of collectively saying, 'That was then. This is now."

 

It implies a deliberate psychological breakpoint from whatever came before. One imagines placing a Present clock in a community rebuilding after trauma – for example, a town recovering from a disaster, or even the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the COVID crisis, many people reported that "their experience of time [had] become warped and weird" noemamag.com – days blurred, months dragged or vanished noemamag.com. Social rhythms broke down under lockdowns, and we lost collective markers of time (no graduations, no public holidays together, etc.).

 

In the wake of the pandemic, society has been asking: how do we recover our sense of time? Installing a gentle public year-clock could be one answer – a way to re-synchronize with nature and with each other, to declare a reset of temporal perspective. "That was then, this is now" also carries an element of forgiveness and renewal: we acknowledge the past is past and orient ourselves to the present moment (which, as Thrift's definition expands, is not fleeting but generously profound). In a city square, such a clock might become a gathering point – "Meet me by the year clock" – and over time, citizens might take pride in how their clock's colors look at certain times of year, the way one might take pride in cherry blossoms in spring or foliage in fall.

 

All these are possibilities. As of this writing, Thrift is actively campaigning and collaborating to fund and build the first of these public installations. It represents a pivot from the personal to the collective.

 

If the first decade of The Present was about changing individual lives (10,000 of them, one by one), the next decade might be about changing the atmosphere of public life in many places. It's a bold vision, but a remarkably non-commercial one: this isn't about selling more units (a public clock is one sale, after all, not hundreds); it's about advancing a cultural intervention.

 

Thrift often speaks of time literacy – the idea that society needs to become more literate about time's various scales and modes, much as we did about literacy in reading or numeracy in math. In that sense, a prominent installation of The Present in, say, an excellent hospital or a parliament building would be a civic statement that time is not just clocks and calendars – it is also seasons, cycles, and lived moments. These deserve a place in our public consciousness.

 

VII. Synthesis: Temporal Bandwidth, Industrial Time, and a Gift to the Species

 

We've journeyed from Pynchon's dark prophecy of a narrowed now to the hopeful vision of public timepieces enriching our collective life. It's time to tie the threads together.

 

Thomas Pynchon gave us a vocabulary – temporal bandwidth – for understanding what's at stake: a narrow present makes us flimsy and controllable; a wide present gives us density and freedom en.wikiquote.org

 

Lewis Mumford and the history of industrialization showed how our present got narrowed in the first place: through railroads, clocks, and stopwatches, we regimented time for productivity, until "timekeeping passed into time-serving and time-rationing" and the clock became "the key machine" of our age. bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com In the quest to master minutes, we let the moments master us.

 

Henri Bergson and kindred thinkers reminded us that this need not be so – that there is another way to live in time, by embracing duration and qualitative, cyclic time rather than chopping time into quantitative fragments. bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com Eastern philosophies likewise offered models of cyclical, spacious time that could reintegrate us with natural rhythms en.wikipedia.org.

 

Scott Thrift absorbed all these lessons and then did something wonderfully concrete: he created a device to widen the present. In doing so, he turned an abstract philosophical critique into a tangible, experiential reality. The Present clock is essentially Mondaugen's Law made into an artwork – it gives anyone who lives with it a broader temporal bandwidth (a year-long "now" to inhabit) and, hence, a more grounded sense of self in time. It also reflects Bergsonian and Eastern ideas by portraying time as a continuous circle rather than a series of chopped units. bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com

 

The clock is a mechanism for liberation: liberation from the one-dimensional time of industrial modernity, into a more multidimensional awareness. And it does this not by requiring you to abandon modern life or move to a monastery, but simply by hanging on your wall and slightly adjusting the mental lens through which you view the passing of days.

 

What makes The Present particularly powerful is that it operates non-verbally and universally. Unlike a book or a lecture, it doesn't demand linguistic understanding or prior knowledge. A child can read it (by color) as easily as an adult. It works across cultures – every culture knows seasons, even if they might interpret the colors differently or have opposite seasons in the other hemisphere. There's a quiet inclusivity to it. One might say The Present is a gift, not a gadget.

 

People do buy it, of course, but what they are really acquiring is an invitation to see differently. Many have noted that living with The Present for a while changes their perception of conventional clocks: you start to feel how frantic a ticking second hand is, how arbitrary the end of a month is. The Present clock on your wall becomes a companion that always implicitly says, "Slow down. Zoom out. There is time." In a world saturated with devices vying for our milliseconds of attention, a device that asks for almost none of your attention – yet still manages to enrich your awareness – is quite extraordinary.

 

It feels appropriate to speak of it in nearly altruistic terms: it is a gift to the species, a small antidote to temporal burnout. It aligns with a broader movement in design and technology toward mindfulness and well-being, rather than speed and distraction. As one design writer observed, "It's a simple perspective shift that can change how you think about your waking hours ... making it seem like you've been magically handed more time." thepresent.is when you change the way you measure time, indeed, "you can change the way you measure your life." freundevonfreunden.com.

This is not to indulge in utopian exaggeration.

 

A clock alone won't solve humanity's problems. But as a symbol and tool, The Present and its envisioned public progeny point toward something profoundly important: a rebalancing of our temporal ecology. For the last two hundred years, Western culture (and increasingly global culture) has been running ever faster on the thin tracks of clock-time, often to our detriment. We've been "time-sick," suffering the "long-term effects of short-term thinking" wired.com.

 

To heal, we need to recover duration, to thicken our experience of the now. We need to remember what time feels like, not just what time it costs. Projects like Thrift's are signals that this recovery is underway. It's telling that he is not alone – others have created slow clocks, writers have penned books on the importance of tempo giusto (the right pace), and communities have revived seasonal festivals – it's as if the pendulum (pun intended) is swinging back to seek a new equilibrium.

 

The ultimate vision Thrift and others evoke is a world where private individuals, public institutions, and future generations all live with a wider present. In such a world, a person might check a regular clock to make a meeting on time, but also check a Present clock to orient their soul to the season. Schools might teach children not only how to read minutes, but how to appreciate the turning of the year. Governments and organizations, with reminders of long-term time in their halls, might plan for the next century, not just the next quarter.

 

In the end, expanding temporal bandwidth is about context and connection. It's about feeling yourself part of a continuum – one that stretches backward in remembered history and forward in imagined future, and outward in solidarity with all others sharing this moment in the big, pulsing rhythm of the planet.

 

Pynchon warned what happens when that continuum is cut off; Thrift offers one gentle way to start mending it. The clockmaker's daughter, Lazlah (named after the novelist), will grow up, we can hope, with a rich sense of time – not merely the instant gratification tech time of her peers, but also the slow time her father's work embodies. Perhaps by the time she's an adult, she'll stroll through a city where public year clocks are as common as public parks, each one reminding busy passers-by: breathe, this moment is more than this moment. That was then. This is now. And inside that "now," a whole spectrum of time unfolds for those who have eyes to see.

 

Sources:

• Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. (1973). Quote on temporal bandwidth and personal density en.wikiquote.orglithub.com.
• Jacobs, Ronald. "Visions of Apocalypse: How Gravity's Rainbow Embodied America's Post-War Fears." Literary Hub. (April 2020) – Summary of Pynchon's ending and Slothrop's dissolution lithub.com
• Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. (1934). Discussion of the clock as the key machine of modernity, bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com, and its effects on dissociating time from human events bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com
• "America's first time zone." Harvard Gazette. (November 10, 2011) – Historical account of railroad time standardization and accidents news.harvard.edu
• International Meridian Conference (1884) records – establishment of Greenwich as prime meridian en.wikipedia.org and gradual adoption of standard time (UK 1880, US 1918) en.wikipedia.org
• Bastian, Michelle. "Liberating Clocks: Developing a Critical Horology…" (2020). Excerpt on The Present, encouraging a present longer than a second and adding variety to how we tell time thepresent.is.
• Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will (1889) / Creative Evolution (1907). Concepts of pure duration vs mechanistic time muogbomichael.blogspot.com and the interpenetration of moments in conscious https://www.ibiblio.org/
• "Hindu cosmology – Time." Wikipedia. Summaries of cyclical time in Hindu thought en.wikipedia.org.
• Thrift, Scott. About The Present. (thepresent.is, retrieved 2025) – Thrift's question "How can we live in the moment if the moment changes every second?" and realization that the present had become a hairline fracture thepresent.is.
• Wired (Ashworth, Boone. "Want to Slow Down Time? Use a Really Slow Clock." July 20, 2020) – Profile of Scott Thrift's clocks: quotes about being off balance with linear time wired.com and needing long-term devices for long-term thinking wired.com.
• Noema Magazine (Zadeh, Joe. "The Tyranny of Time." June 3, 2021) – On societal clock-time and pandemic time warp noemamag.com
• Freunde von Freunden (FvF) interview with Scott Thrift, "Ahead of Time: ... the Cure for the Common Clock." (2016) – Thrift on the perspective of a year and clocks not changing for 200 years freundevonfreunden.com
• Press materials from The Present (thepresent.is) – Krasznahorkai's inscription calling The Present "the most beautiful time mask of the world." thepresent.is, design commentary in Design Milk, Fast Company, etc.
• Butler, Christopher. "Object – The Present Clock." personal blog (May 16, 2023) – Personal reflections of a Present owner (the clock as a reminder, memento mori vs memento vivere) chrbutler.com
• Britannica, "Taylorism." – Description of Taylor's stopwatch studies and the transformation of work into timed motions britannica.com.
• Yolanda Keys, "Design features influencing circadian rhythm." Health Facilities Management Magazine (August 29, 2024) – Notes on how environmental design (lighting) can support healthy time perception in hospitals hfmmagazine.com.