The Time Keeper

by Mitch Albom

You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.

Nim’s tower. It stood so tall; its peak was hidden by clouds. Dor raced toward it, obsessed with one last hope. He had watched time and charted time and measured time and analyzed time, and he was determined now to reach the only place where time could be changed. The heavens. He would climb the tower and do what the gods had not. He would make time stop.

“Man rarely knows his own power,” the old man said.

Although it was a relatively new science (the first person cryogenically frozen was in 1972), the thinking behind cryonics was not illogical. Freeze the dead body. Wait for science to advance. Unfreeze the body. Bring it back to life and cure it.

But a desperate heart will seduce the mind.

You sought to control time, the old man had said. For your penance, the wish is granted.

Can you imagine having endless time to learn? If you could freeze a moving car and study it for hours? Wander through a museum touching every artifact, the security guards never knowing you were there? That is how Dor explored our world. Using the power of the hourglass, he slowed time to suit his needs. Although he could never stop it completely—a train might move an inch in the hours he spent investigating it—he could easily hold people in place while he circulated through them, touching their coats or their shoes, trying on their eyeglasses, rubbing the clean-shaven faces of men, so different from his time, when long beards were common. These people would remember nothing of his presence, only the quickest flicker across their field of vision.

As he walked between the massive skyscrapers, he was reminded of Nim’s tower. He wondered if there were no end to man’s ambitions.

Accuracy improved at a startling rate. Although it took until the sixteenth century for the minute hand to be invented, by the seventeenth century, the pendulum clock was accurate to within a minute a day. Less than one hundred years later, it was within a second.

Sometimes, when you are not getting the love you want, giving makes you think you will.

With his power over time, Dor could have taken anything he desired from this new world. But a man who can take anything will find most things unsatisfying. And a man without memories is just a shell.

And he felt a familiar twinge of sadness he experienced whenever he witnessed modern medicine: Alli had died alone, on a blanket in the high plains. Had she been of this generation, might she not have lived a long life? He wondered how it was fair that your dying should depend so much on when you were born.

He came to America and learned that those who made the most of their time prospered.

“We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes, we forget what we have.”

Victor was determined to control his dying the way he’d controlled his living.

A heart weighs more when it splits in two; it crashes in the chest like a broken plane.

Dor came from a time before the written word, a time when if you wished to speak with someone, you walked to see them. This time was different. The tools of this era—phones, computers—enabled people to move at a blurring pace. Yet despite all they accomplished, they were never at peace. They constantly checked their devices to see what time it was—the very thing Dor had tried to determine once with a stick, a stone, and a shadow.

There was no hope of fixing this. And when hope is gone, time is punishment.

He almost never gave interviews, believing that, in finance, secrecy was an ally.

Einstein once postulated that if you traveled at an enormous rate of speed, time would actually slow down relative to the world you left behind,

When we are most alone is when we embrace another’s loneliness.

May I continue to provide you a fraction of the hope and inspiration that you provide me.