One of my Thanksgiving break projects is to finish a paper comparing the views of Maimonides and Averroes on the relation of the truths of faith and philosophy. To that end, I’m reading the fabulous new biography of Maimonides by Joel Kraemer: Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds.

One of Maimonides early claims to fame was a treatise on the calendar (which he wrote when he was twenty—my age). In the course of explaining the significance of his understanding of the calendar, Kraemer offers the following fascinating background:

It is important to realize that the hours of the day for Maimonides’ contemporaries had different lengths depending on the seasons. As the earth revolves around the sun, the length of the period of daylight changes. The ancients divided a day into twelve equal parts of daytime and nighttime, so the length of their hours, called seasonal hours, actually varied. In Maimonides milieu, people counted twelve hours of nighttime and twelve hours of daytime, whatever the length of daylight. … Having seasonal hours, it was most convenient for people to tell time by using sundials.

Reflecting on that concept of time—in which an hour could be anywhere from 40 minutes to 80 minutes, depending on the season—I was suddenly struck by the strangeness of our time-keeping. We have utterly divorced time-keeping from light, presumably in order to comply with our demand for precision in public interaction, our need to predict in conceivable units how our day will be spent. But in the sundial days, time breathed in a natural way, such that one’s time-keeping gradually changed with the seasons. Now we arbitrarily, with a mechanical jerk, accommodate the demands of light with “daylight savings time.”

I wonder what effects upon/results from our collective self-understanding this difference implies?