KN Magazine: Articles
Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – Column 14: The Missing Hour: The Curious Elasticity of Time
In this installment of Between Pen and Paper, Andi Kopek explores the strange, elastic nature of time—from the lost hour of daylight saving to the way memory, storytelling, and even planetary movement reshape how we experience it. Blending science, literature, and personal reflection, “The Missing Hour” invites writers to consider how time bends not only in the universe, but on the page.
By Andi Kopek
Last night was one hour shorter than usual.
My phone said so, my car clock confirmed it, and my coffee maker seemed slightly offended by the sudden schedule change. At two in the morning, we simply moved the clock forward and politely agreed that sixty minutes had vanished.
This annual ritual is called daylight saving time. Yet it rarely makes me think about daylight, and it certainly doesn’t feel like savings.
What it really makes me think about is something much stranger. Time.
Time appears perfectly orderly when we look at a clock. Seconds march forward with mechanical confidence. Minutes stack neatly into hours, hours into days, days into years.
But the moment we pay attention to how time actually feels, the neat machinery begins to wobble.
Five minutes waiting in line for coffee can feel longer than two hours spent sipping it with friends. The last ten minutes before a deadline accelerate with alarming enthusiasm. Meanwhile a “quick check” of the phone somehow lasts forty-seven minutes. And childhood summers, when we were eight or nine years old, somehow lasted forever.
Clocks measure minutes. Humans measure experiences.
Writers know this especially well. Three hours at a desk may produce a single stubborn paragraph. Yet occasionally an idea arrives and five pages appear in twenty minutes as if the words had been patiently waiting somewhere outside ordinary time.
For the reader, of course, the ratio reverses. A page that took three days to prepare may be consumed in thirty seconds.
Writing, in this sense, quietly bends time.
Time becomes even stranger when we start moving across the planet itself.
One of the most delightful examples appears in my all-time favorite book, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, a storytelling genius. In the novel, the famously punctual Phileas Fogg travels around the globe to win a wager that he can do it in eighty days. When he returns to London, he believes he has lost the bet by a single day.
But he has forgotten something subtle.
Because he traveled eastward around the Earth, crossing time zones along the way, he quietly gained a day without realizing it. While racing the clock, he had slipped ahead of the calendar itself.
Travel in the right direction around the planet and time behaves differently.
Our modern system of time zones is surprisingly recent. In the 19th century every town in America kept its own local solar time. Noon simply meant when the sun was directly overhead. That worked fine until railroads appeared. Suddenly trains were trying to run on hundreds of slightly different clocks. In 1883 the railroads solved the problem by introducing standardized time zones across North America.
On November 18, what became known as “The Day of Two Noons,” thousands of clocks were reset in a single afternoon. For a brief moment, some cities experienced noon twice.
Modern science fiction has pushed this idea even further. In Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, astronauts visit worlds where gravity stretches time so dramatically that a few hours for them equal years back on Earth.
You do not need black holes, however, to find a planet with a different clock.
I am currently working on a science-fiction novel that takes place partly on Mars.
A Martian day, called a sol, lasts about twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes. Each sunrise arrives just a little later than the one before it, as if the planet itself prefers to linger.
Even more striking, however, is the Martian year. While Earth circles the Sun once every 365 days, Mars takes 687 days to complete its orbit. A year there is almost twice as long as ours.
The simple astronomical act of circling the Sun for nearly twice as long as Earth has surprising consequences.
A ten-year-old by the Martian calendar would be roughly the same age as a twenty-year-old on Earth. Education might unfold differently. Careers might develop at another rhythm. What does retirement mean if a year is nearly twice as long? And what exactly is a thirty-year mortgage on a planet where years stretch so far apart?
Birthdays themselves might become rarer and perhaps more meaningful. On Mars, a child might wait nearly two Earth years before blowing out another set of birthday candles.
That reveals something quietly profound.
A year is not a universal measurement of time. Change the planet and you change the calendar. Change the calendar and you change the meaning of life.
Which makes our annual daylight-saving ritual seem almost modest by comparison.
Last night we misplaced an hour when the clocks jumped forward. Jules Verne once showed that a traveler could gain a whole day by circling the Earth. And somewhere on Mars, a twenty-year-old visitor from Earth would discover that, by the local calendar, they are barely eleven.
The more we think about it, the stranger time becomes.
We imagine it as something universal and precise, yet it quietly shifts depending on where we stand, how fast we move, or even which planet we call home.
Einstein showed that time is relative. Perhaps it is more like an ocean, and every world simply drifts through it at its own pace.
Last night was one hour shorter than usual for some inhabitants of the pale blue dot drifting through endless space.
But if that missing hour sparks a moment of reflection about lost hours, gained days, and life on other planets, then perhaps it was not lost at all.
Andi
Andi Kopek is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. With a background in medicine, molecular neuroscience, and behavioral change, he has recently devoted himself entirely to the creative arts. His debut poetry collection, Shmehara, has garnered accolades in both literary and independent film circles for its innovative storytelling.
When you’re in Nashville, feel free catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.
website: andikopekart.ink
FB: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093119557533
IG: https://www.instagram.com/andi.kopek/
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