It had originally been built for a monk who had obtained permission to study astronomy, and the abbot had taken a sort of medieval pride in his work when it was first begun. A monastery should, by tradition, be a center of learning, and it was felt that an accomplished astronomer would be an asset to the place. This monk, let us call him Dom Griphen, was provided with a large telescope and other necessary equipment, and he was given to understand that epoch-making discoveries were expected of him as soon as possible.
Some years passed and no new planet swam into the field of his telescope, but he explained that he was engaged in lengthy calculations which needed some considerable passage of time for their corroboration, and he was allowed to continue undisturbed. Each day, as soon as religious duties were fulfilled, he disappeared up the long walks and alleys of the monastery garden to lock himself into the summer house which had been turned into an observatory. He appeared only in church and at the necessary meals where no conversation is allowed, and thus escaped close questioning from the other monks as to the manner in which his experiments were progressing. Several years passed, during which no one but the abbot had exchanged a word with him. One day he was asked to appear at a convocation to announce to the assembled monks the results of his years of observation and calculation.
In a short time the grapevine which connected the school and the monastery brought the great news to us. It appeared that Dom Griphen had discovered for certain that the day did not consist of a period of twenty-four hours. For years, for centuries, or perhaps even longer, the world had been laboring under the delusion that the solar day could be divided exactly into twenty-four hours, 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds. This was a colossal error, and Brother Griphen had the proof of it.
The grapevine had brought no exact information as to the margin of error. Some impressionable and slack-tongued brothers went so far as to claim that there was a considerable divergence between the result of his calculations and the conventional, accepted solar day. Some claimed that it accounted for the long days in summer, and the short days in winter, but as the monks were all obliged to get up in the middle of the night and troop into the church to sing, it could hardly make much difference to them. It was decided by the abbot that the great discovery should not be made known to the world until it had been referred to Rome, for it might conflict with some point of doctrine. It may be, also, that the abbot was a little skeptical.
Dom Griphen was told that the College of Cardinals must study the matter, and he was warned that this body might take years to decide on it. He was a little discouraged, for he remembered questions that had not been settled in a lifetime or two, and he was afraid that they might not decide upon the matter until after his own death. Dom Griphen had realized while very young that the world was in moral error, and for that reason he had left it. Now he was persuaded that the very physical world was continually presenting the brethren with an error in time itself. The hours were striking at every breath they drew, and striking false. He proposed to the abbot that the error should be rectified at least in the world of school and monastery over which he had jurisdiction.
Father Abbot hastily explained that such a thing was impossible until they had received word from Rome. The Church Temporal should deal with Time. The abbot suggested further that Dom Griphen might have made some slight error in his calculations and sent him away advising him to recheck his figures for a few months. Dom Griphen came back later and said that he had made no mistake. He attempted to reassure the abbot, explaining that one could continue to divide the day into twenty-four hours, but that it was the day itself which was at fault and that threw the hours, minutes, and seconds out. A simple adjustment in the minutes, a fraction of a second here and there, would correct this age-old error. The abbot remained adamant. He could do nothing until Rome had spoken. Dom Griphen almost dared suspect that the abbot was trifling with him. He pleaded that the daily correction itself would not be too large; a trial ought to be given it.
The abbot, however, considered the matter closed, and called one of the younger monks to him, ordering him to pursue his mathematical studies, and prepare himself to become an astronomer. He gave him his blessing and intimated that he hoped it would be possible to put the observatory into his hands before the equipment had become completely obsolete.
It was some time before the monastery noticed any change in the habits of Dom Griphen. He considered the daily error to be a small one, but one in which he at least could not remain. He asked another monk, whose hobby was watchmaking, to make him a clock according to his specifications. The hands were to make two revolutions of the dial each day, but they were to move more quickly and clip a fraction off each hour. The clock would then tell the correct time: his correct time. When the clock was finished, he proceeded to live according to the time which it indicated. At first the difference was so minute that he appeared at meals or at devotions at the same time as his companions. Yet slowly and inexorably he parted from his fellows, drawn further and further away by time itself.
At first he came a little early for some of the ceremonies, and then he began to come later and later for others. He came so late that he seemed to be coming early for still another duty, until there was no way in which one could check just which duty he was fulfilling. Soon the whisper went around, snatches of surmise gabbled from behind breviaries, harsh words said from the corners of pious mouths. Nevertheless, primitive people respect madness and pamper madmen, saying that they are blessed, and so it was within the monastery walls. Brother Griphen continued to live by his time. It played occasional tricks on him—but does it not play tricks on us all?
As the brethren hurried along the cloisters to sing in the new day which begins after each midnight, they often met Dom Griphen with a candle going off to his lunch or breakfast. He sang vespers when they sang matins. His lauds and his antiphonies were indistinguishable. As the years rolled on, his time would nevertheless draw him, like some returning comet, back into their orbit, and for a while his actions would coincide with the pattern of their lives, until one day they would notice that he was moving off again to his midnight meals and sunlit sleep. He sometimes went and sang alone in the church as his clock bade him, and otherwise fulfilled his duties most scrupulously.
He made great looping circles through the seemingly straight line of life in the monastery. He was an awesome creature, like a man from another planet, and I remember him well as in old age he shuffled around the drafty corridors or moved slowly over the gravel paths to his observatory.
In spite of his double unworldliness, he was well aware of the younger monk, who was by now verging on middle age, to whom the abbot had given the mission of preparing himself to take over the observatory. He knew very well that this younger man was filled with only theoretical knowledge of the stars and filled too with a longing to get his hands on the telescope which Dom Griphen had never allowed him to touch. This idea filled his last years with rage and bitterness.
One summer morning, three hours after sunrise, Dom Griphen walked through the monastery gardens with death holding his elbow. But even death could hold him upright no longer when he collapsed just inside the abbey church, where the monks were droning out their Latin hymns. He fell to the stone floor and died. The rival astronomer assisted those who carried him to his cell. This last charitable act, undertaken mainly because he had hoped to find the key to the observatory under the robes of the dead monk, was a mistake. As he looked toward the garden he saw a pillar of smoke rising straight up into the summer air, and by the time he reached the observatory, it was a furnace dripping hot metal. Dom Griphen had reversed the telescope, arranging the great magnifying glasses in such a way that by the time he had reached the church the first pale rays of the sun had converged on his papers and caused them to burst into flames. He had forestalled his rival.
The Story of Uncle Tom, A Historical Narrative
To Master—A Long Goodnight (1946) was Gysin’s first book, published by Eileen
