What I learned on my China Vacation

1. The length of a day depends on how far you stray from your bed.

2. Water and oxygen are among the most destructive elements in the universe. So is love.

3. The Chinese man pushing his invalid mother behind me in a wheelchair proves by his “Hello” the emptiness of the proposition that words have meaning.

4. Language is rife with superfluous precision.

Regarding number 1, I've often been struck by this quasi-arbitrary notion of a day. We may be trained to assume or believe that before you can measure something, it has to exist. But this apparently is not the case. The measurement of the day creates the day, as becomes more and more apparent the more closely you try to measure it. In its grossest measure, it's pretty simple, a day is the interval of light between darknesses. There are latitudes where this causes problems, but few people live in those latitudes, relatively speaking. But when you want to mark where one day turns into another, you have a problem. But it's not a big problem. You create a ruler (love that word!) and break the intervals up into sections. What matters is the hours. The number 24 is arbitrary, but useful. If take the total expanse from the middle of one dark period to the middle of the next and break it into 24 equal units--voila, a day. When clocks aren't all that precise, the fact that the units themselves lack perfection doesn't raise a noticeable problem. But as you try to measure more precisely, into minutes and seconds, then you come into the wobble problem. Days are not exactly equal. They're astonishingly close. But clocks have become more precise than the thing they were created to measure. The brilliant solution to this problem is to announce or pronounce that our clocks no longer measure the temporal distance from the middle of one dark to the middle of the next (or from noon to noon). What do they measure? A period of 24 hours. This can be done very precisely because the thing being measured is created by the ruler itself. It's true by definition. Days do not exist as such. But that doesn't mean we can't measure them.

The problem becomes even more complicated when you think about the 24 hour period itself. Plane travel makes it apparent that from an experiential standpoint, a day can be much longer or much shorter than 24 hours. "Experiential" is the key word here. For a day to be 24 hours long you have to define it from a spot, the spot where you place your clock. As soon as a human gets out of bed, she changes the length of her day, and constantly changes it as she crosses the longitude of her bed or moves along it. No one experiences a day as 24 hours except invalids or other sick people.

So there's no such thing as a day. Days aren't 24 hours long. And yet we can measure them.

As for number 3, the prejudice that words have meaning is so ingrained that at first it seems difficult to comprehend that in fact they don't "have" meaning. A word does not have to "have" a meaning for it to be used in a meaningful way (or if not meaning-full, since meaning is never full, certainly in a meaning-generative way). In short, the man behind me was asking me politely to get out of his way so that he could move past me with the wheelchair. He was using his only English in order to inform me that I was the object of his speech. His intention was to get me to direct my intention toward him so that I could infer what he wanted. If you look up "Hello" in the dictionary, it won't list, "Please get out of my way, foreigner" as one of the definitions. But that was the meaning of "hello" in this case, and I would argue that the word was properly used. Words have uses and histories of uses, not meanings. Words normalize and regulate situations or events. This gives us the illusion that the "signified" is tied to the "signifier." (This is part of a discussion that has been going on for over a century now, which you learn all about and also enter in graduate schools in many disciplines. I'm fascinated by it and always on the look out for examples that illustrate this.)

As for number 4, many times each day in this crowded city I found myself impeding the progress of someone, usually someone on a bike. To move me out of their way, most of them rang a bell which sounded a lot like the bells they attached to children's bikes when I was a child, fifty years ago. But when the biker or pedestrian didn't have a bell, they used various phrases in English or Mandarin to serve the function of the bell, not just "hello," but "good morning," "excuse me," and others. It occurred to me that there are a lot of ways to ask people to get our of your way, but they all come down to the ringing of a bell. Some just grunted. The words are all associated with various other meanings than "please, I'm in a hurry, let me pass." And the possibility of processing those associated meanings is always present. But the "good morning" was never really a wish for me to have a good morning any more than the "hello" was a greeting. Those meanings in fact could only interfere with the intention, which is inferred from the fact of a sound. The advantage of a voice over a bell is the greater precision it renders for emotion. But even a bell can be polite, sympathetic, or angry.