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The Persistence of Time

The Persistence of Time

Last updated on: December 6, 2025 at 11:22 am by Father Pablo Migone

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The Persistence of Time 2025-12-06T11:22:15-05:00 Father Pablo Migone

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Growing up, hanging in the living room of my house was a metal square clock with red numbers and a pale white background. The clock was quite unusual, always making it a conversation piece. The numbers were not in the correct place – it appeared as if they had been shaken up and fallen out of place. Most were jumbled on the lower right-hand side of the clock. Another clock ticked in the dining room. At night, I could hear the ticking as I lay in bed, and its ringing at night on the hour and half hour gave me a sense of comfort and security. This beautiful wooden clock had belonged to my great-grandfather Manuel Migone. We have family pictures taken in the old farmhouse with the clock hanging on the wall of the dining room. Most of the family members smiling in the pictures have now passed away, but the clock continues to undisturbedly mark the passage of time now at my mother’s house.

While I was in college, I stopped wearing a watch. This was before cell phones had become common, so not having a watch meant simply not knowing what time it was. Studying philosophy did not help me change my mind, rather, it fostered a spirit of defiance that I did not want to be controlled by the ticking of the clock. I did not want to be rushed. I did not want to conform. I wanted to live life at my own pace.

Despite my futile rebellion, time pushes everything and everyone forward whether we want it or not. When the alarm clock sounds in the morning, I am helpless in defending myself against the passage of time. The snooze button only delays the inevitable. Whether awake or asleep, the seconds will pass one at a time. The clock will continue to measure the passage of time.

Salvador Dali’s famous melting clocks are a representation of an attempt to slow time down. Dali once explained that his famous painting “The Persistence of Memory” was inspired by watching a block of cheese helplessly melt when placed over heat. As cheese melts down, so Dali found that time can melt in a person’s mind. Even though the passage of time does not care about our opinions or feelings, the experience of time can melt away in the human mind. Recently a couple celebrating its fiftieth wedding anniversary mentioned how quickly life has gone by – a sobering statement. Though time ticks at only one pace, our mind has the ability to mold it, go back through memory and even go forward in expectation. Dali’s melting clocks point to our desire to melt time so that we can exert some degree of control over it, mostly, to slow it down.

Modernity has grown to be ruled by the clock, yet the modernist clock that hung in the living room of my house stood as an act of defiance to this reality. It was a deconstruction of the experience of time, just like Dali’s famous clocks. The desire to control time may be rooted in our desire to live forever. The more time passes, the closer I am to my death. Yet, as Christians, we long for an encounter with Jesus Christ who will pluck us out from the passage of time in order to experience eternity. In eternity there will be no before or after, there will be no ticking of clocks. Time is absent in eternity. Heaven will be an eternal now where every desire will be met. Perhaps only then will my rebellion against time will be satisfied.

Picture information found here. “The Passage of Time” by Toni Verdú Carbó, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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