For thousands of years, humans only really noted time by the sun rising and setting. The summer and winter solstice, the longest and shortest days of the year, respectively, served as indicators of how long until harvest, when to move camp, and the best places during that particular time of year for hunting, fishing, and lying in the sun.
You get a whiff of this genetic ancestry, of time without time, most often outdoors, especially when you’re camping. Amplified, obviously, by taking off your watch or leaving your phone in the tent. You find yourself eating when you’re hungry, exploring when you feel restless, climbing into the hammock when you’re tired. And if you happen to be with friends or family, at least one moment during the day, you’ll look across the picnic table at someone and happily confess: “I have no idea what time it is.”
It's the first week of June. On today's episode of Something I Heard, Anthony Doerr reads a poem by Charles Simic, simply titled: “Stone.” Simic was a Serbian-American poet, in addition to serving as the poetry editor for The Paris Review. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1990 for his collection, The World Doesn’t End.
Anthony Doerr is the author of the novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, a pair of celebrated story collections, and All the Light We Cannot See, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
