Sun Dials Say Things

YES, I like sundials. I like to read the inscriptions on them. I have a collection of such inscriptions. One of the best I know is an inscription once found by Alexander Woollcott on a dial: “It is later than you think, friend!”

Another that I like is: “I record only the sunny hours.” On the day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed away I happened to be crossing Harvard Yard. I had crossed it a thousand times before, but I had never stopped to read the inscription on the sundial in the Yard.

That day I was in a thoughtful mood and stopped to read it. Here it is: “On this minute hangs eternity.” How dramatically that inscription burned itself into the meaning of that dire day. I stood there remembering that 94 President Roosevelt, as a college student, had passed by that dial hundreds of times, that he had walked under those rapidly greening trees in the old Yard, and that he too had often stood in the shadow of those ancient buildings.

Then, as I stood there, that inscription brought back to my memory a saying of Thomas Carlyle which began to ring in my heart like the toll of the president’s funeral bells: Man? Stands he not at the center of immensities: at the conflux of eternities?” I looked up into the sky and had a sudden feeling that I, as an individual, was actually standing at that minute in the very center of immensity; that, at that very minute, I was actually standing at the “conflux of eternities”; that all the time there ever was, was behind me, and that all the time and eternity there would ever be was before me; that that very minute, that very second, was the heart of time and the universe.

Then I suddenly knew the full meaning of all immensities and all time; “On this minute hangs eternity!” & What a simple statement was inscribed on that sun dial, and what a wallop there was in the inscription: a sudden awareness of the value of time; that no minutes, no seconds, are to be idly wasted; that every second is like so much precious gold, to be used and lived and laughed in and loved in; that every minute of time and eternity are in¬ valuable.