The Time Keeper

Dor’s timekeeping is not explicitly described as a sin in the way that Genesis 3 describes Adam and Eve’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, Dor’s measurement of time similarly strips humanity of some of its innate innocence, and the motif that knowledge leads to a loss of innocence and ultimately causes suffering and misery appears throughout the text. This motif intersects with the theme of Humans’ Relationship with Time, since the knowledge of time causes humanity to reorient the way it understands its existence. The narrator frequently reminds the reader that timekeeping is a form of knowledge that is uniquely human. At the end of Chapter 2, humans are contrasted with animals in that animals live their lives ignorant of calendars and clocks while humans order their lives around timekeeping, and this makes their lives more miserable: “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” (8).

Similarly, when Dor first begins to count and measure, understanding the world scientifically and through patterns rather than something that is simply dictated by the will of the gods, “everything changed” (18). This new way of viewing the world, this new knowledge apart from the divine, destroyed the simpler human understanding of the world and that innocence could not be regained.