Clocks — Key Ideas to Explore

The Unreliable Clock as Comic Antagonist

Jerome personifies clocks as willful adversaries. The 'always right' clock is a 'dangerous rival' that lures its owner into 'child-like faith' before betraying him at the railway station. The description of the morning departure—'kiss your children, and afterward wipe your jammy mouth, poke your finger in the baby's eye'—builds a scene of domestic chaos that culminates in a sprint to the station. Jerome then poses a rhetorical question about which is worse: arriving three-quarters of an hour early or watching the train depart. This passage exemplifies his technique of escalating a mundane frustration into a universal dilemma.

The Clock That Struck Thirteen

The essay's central anecdote involves a clock that 'struck thirteen' and set off a chain of superstitious dread. Jerome's wife interprets the anomaly as an omen of death, first for the baby, then for her husband, then for 'Aunt Maria.' The narrator's attempts to dismiss the matter—'I said I did not know, but hoped it might be the next-door dog'—only deepen her alarm. As the clock continues to strike thirteen 'all day long for months,' the couple's reactions shift from panic to resignation to dark humor. Jerome uses this episode to explore how people impose meaning on random mechanical behavior, and how domestic life accommodates the absurd.

Mocking Time Itself

In the essay's final movement, Jerome speculates on the clock's motives: 'Has he, ticking, ticking, all these years, come at last to see into the littleness of that Time that looms so great to our awed human eyes?' The clock's irregular strikes—'thirty-nine and forty-one'—become a form of rebellion, an 'open insult' to the orderly progression of hours. Jerome entertains the idea that the clock, as a longtime servant, has grown contemptuous of its master. This philosophical turn is undercut by the clock's absurd behavior: it 'calls half-past two thirty-eight o'clock, and in twenty minutes from then it says it is one!' The essay thus balances whimsy with a genuine meditation on human attempts to measure and control time.

Jerome's essay rewards readers who appreciate digressive humor and a narrator who treats his own foibles with affectionate irony. The piece moves briskly, its 6,954 words unfolding in a single, uninterrupted section. Pay attention to the shifts in register—from mock-heroic complaint to philosophical speculation to deadpan punchline. The clock that strikes forty-nine but never fifty is a detail that lingers, emblematic of Jerome's ability to find meaning in the meaningless.

Reading Clocks — Key Ideas to Explore, I kept smiling at Jerome’s glorious, unreliable timepieces. That same fond exasperation lingered in my mind when I later revisited The Merry-Go-Round — Reading Notes—the dizzying spin of everyday things, never quite landing where expected. There’s a quiet kinship there, a shared knowing wink at life’s charming chaos.