The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

observe human affairs with detachment.
    I wasn’t accompanied to school by a servant or page, as most of my friends were. And I didn’t wear new or flamboyantly stylish clothes, waterproof boots, or a warm cloak. I wandered the streets with patches on my knees and my elbows almost popping out from my sleeves. No one kissed me and sent me off to school with a thousand warnings, nor did anyone wait impatiently for my arrival home. In fact the later I returned home, the better it suited my family. But I was happy. Though I lacked love and affection, I had my life and the street. The seasons were mine, in all their varied and playful guises, as was all humanity, the animal kingdom, and the inanimate world.
    Twice a day I would walk from Edirnekapı to Fatih, plunging into a new fantasy with every dawdling step. But as I approached the age of ten, a passion came to sully this happiness. My life’s rhythms were disrupted, it would seem, by the watch my uncle gave me on the occasion of my circumcision. For no matter how innocent a passion might be, it is still a dangerous thing. But I was saved by my spirited nature. It even gave my life direction. One might almost say it gave my life shape. For it may well have been this passion that led me to freedom’s door.
    IV
    When my father recorded my birthday in the back of an old book as the sixteenth day of the holy month ofReceb in the year 1310 of the Islamic calendar, he did so with the same conviction as I do now, in proclaiming that Hayri Irdal’s true date of birth was the very day he received this watch. From the moment they placed it on my pillow—its blue ribbon a testament to the lengths my aunt was willing to go to avoid paying for a chain—my life changed, its deeper meanings suddenly emerging. First the little timepiece nullified my little world, and then it claimed its rightful place, forcing me to abandon my earlier loves: I forgot about those two glorious minarets carved out of chipboard that my uncle had given me (perhaps because my father was thecaretaker of a mosque, and also because we lived just beside the Mihrimah Mosque, my uncle always gave me such gifts, despite the fact that he gave his own children toys that were—to use words still relevant today—modern and secular); and so it was for the enormous kite I so lovingly assembled with the neighborhood children in the courtyard of our house, and thekaragöz puppet set I bought after pilfering scraps of lead from various parts of the mosque and selling them to the chickpea peddler
,
and IbrahimEfendi’s fickle goat I sometimes took out to graze in the cemetery in Edirnekapı and along the old city walls, suffering its mischief when I knew all too well that the stubborn beast wasn’t even mine. For me, the importance of each and every one simply disappeared.
    I fear that readers of these memoirs may glance over what I have written thus far and think that up until that day I’d never seen a watch or that we had no way of keeping time in our home. But in fact our house was host to several clocks.
    Everyone knows that in former times our lives revolved around the clock. According to what I learned from Nuri Efendi, the best customers of Europe’s clockmakers were always Muslims, and some of the most pious Muslims were to be found in our country. The clock dictated all manner of worship: the five daily prayers, as well as meals during the holy month of Ramadan, the evening
iftar
and morning
sahur
. A clock offered the most reliable path to God, and our forefathers regulated their lives with this in mind.
    Time-setting workshops could be found almost everywhere in the city. Even a man with the most pressing business would come to a sudden halt before the office window to pull out a pocket watch befitting his wealth and age—of gold, silver, or enamel, with or without chains, as plump as a pin cushion or a baby turtle, or flat and thin—and, praying that this