And now I begin this book with the old clock that used to stand in the living room at Brekkukot, ticking away. Inside this clock there was a silver bell, whose clear pure note as it struck the hours could be heard not only all over Brekkukot but up in the churchyard as well. In the churchyard there was another bell, a copper bell, whose deep resonant tones carried all the way back into our cottage. And so, when the wind was right, you could hear to bells chiming in harmony in our little turf cottage, the one of silver and the other of copper.
Our clock had a decorated face, and in the middle of the ornamentation one could read the legend that this clock ha been made by Mr. James Cowan of Edinburgh, 1750. It ha been no doubt been built to stand in some other house than Brekkokot, for its plinth had had to be removed so that it could fit under our ceiling. This clock ticked to a slow stately measure, and I soon got the notion that no other clock was worth taking seriously. People’s pocket-watches seemed to me to be dumb infants compared to this clock of ours. The seconds in other people’s watches were like scurrying insects having a race, but the seconds in our time piece at Brekkokot were like cows, and always went as slowly as it is possible without actually standing still.
It goes without saying that if there was anything happening in the room you never heard the clock at all, no more than if it did not exist; but when all was quiet and the visitors had gone and the table had bee cleared and the door shut, ten it would start up again, as steady as ever; and if you listened hard enough you could sometimes make out a singing note in its workings, or something very like an echo.
How did it ever come about, I wonder, that I got the notion that in this clock there lived a strange creature, which was Eternity? Somehow it just occurred to me one day that the word it said when it ticked, a four syllable word with an emphasis on alterative syllables, was et-ERN-it-Y, t-ERN-it-Y. Did I know the word, then?
It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all men are mortal –yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself. It was as if a fish were suddenly to discover the water it swam in. I mentioned this to my grandfather one day when we happened to be alone in the living room.
‘Do you understand the clock, grandfather?” I asked.
‘Here in Brekkokot we know this clock only very slightly,’ he replied. ‘We only know that it tells the days and the hours right down to seconds .But your grandmother’s great-uncle, who owned this clock for sixty-five yeas, told me that the previous owner had said that it once told the phases of the moon – before some watchmaker got to it. Old folk farther back in your grandmother’s family used to maintain that this clock could foretell marriages and deaths; but I don’t take that too seriously, my boy.’
Then I said, ‘Why does the clock always say: et-NER-it-Y, et-NER-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y?’
‘You must be hearing things, my child,’ said my grandfather.
‘Is there no eternity, then?’ I asked.
‘Not otherwise than you have heard in your grandmother’s prayers at night and in the Book of Sermons from me on Sundays, my boy,’ he replied.
“Grandfather,’ I said ’Is eternity a living creature?’
“Try not to talk nonsense, my boy,’; said grandfather.
‘Listen, grandfather, are any clocks other than ours worth taking seriously?’
‘No, said my grandfather.’ Our clock is right. And that is because I have long since stopped letting watchmakers have a look at it,. Indeed, I have never yet come across a watchmaker who understood this click. If I cannot mend it myself, I get some handyman to look at it; I have always found handymen best.’
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