A Brill Calendar: November 8

Musings on Calendar Time

Few cultural attainments and conventions match in importance the calendar week of seven days; maintained meticulously and consistently as it has been by the progeny of the Prophet Abraham – Jewry, Christianity and Islam alike.

This upholding has survived a veritable sea of time, longer than our present reckoning of solar years. In terms of longevity only the sequence of the letters of our dear old alphabet comes close.

And what is more: as a cultural construct the duration of seven diurnal complete rotations of the globe is so deeply rooted in convention and steeped in history, that even the ‘Reign of Terror’ during the French Revolution, believing in the decimal system as if it were an almighty and endlessly benevolent new godhead, could only replace it by a ‘décade’ of ten days for a ludicrously small number of 'annual periods'; from September 1792 to January 1, 1806, when Napoleon made short shrift of this quirk.

The day, the week, the month and the year can conspire with one another in endless diversity and variety. Together, they have built with increasing precision the sequencing of time, chronology; frequencies of remembering and celebrating past events, as well as targets in time and milestones of anticipating (un)desirable future realities. It is not very long ago that ordinary people, simple folk, hardly knew their precise age in years, let alone their calendar birth-day.

Take an example. November 8 was in 1958 also a Saturday, like it is exactly 50 years later. This is not as self-evident as it may seem. The observation involves an ever increasing precision in studying our solar system, a study going back to Classical Antiquity and Julius Caesar; painstaking documentation and recording in writing, day by day, on an unending basis of occurrences, acceptance of incomprehensible recurrences by illiterate communities, and jurisprudence successfully enforced by secular and regular authorities. ‘Contingency’ might be the word; admittedly a rather learned one.