The Locust on the Clock

I was in Cambridge at the end of last year with a group of university students where we were all fascinated by a timepiece on the wall of Corpus Christi College. It can’t really be described as a conventional clock as no hands, or indeed a face were evident. It has been described in a Cambridge brochure as ‘evocatively beautiful but deeply disturbing’.

The official name for this timepiece is the Chronophage which is Greek for ‘Eater (phage) of Time (Chrono)’. Invented by Dr John Taylor (who also invented the cordless kettle), it won the Scientific Invention of the Year in 2008. With the aid of 200 people, he took five years over the million-pound project which was unveiled in 2008 by Stephen Hawking. It was made of solid gold, aluminium and enamel which are materials which should last for hundreds of years – the closest man can come to challenging time. Tired of modern art which he maintained ‘says nothing’, he wanted to depict something which would entertain but at the same time interact with the spectator. I experienced exactly that with members of my group as we all stood watching in total silence for at least half an hour - just lost in our own thoughts.

On the one hand, we were fascinated by the mechanics of the clock. Three lights were flashing indicating the hour, the minute and the second. Sitting atop of it all, was a locust type creature eating away the seconds. At the end of a minute, its mouth which had been slowly opening, snapped shut indicating that a minute had been devoured and would never come back. To make the point even more vividly, at the end of the hour, a hammer came out and knocked on a coffin.

On the other hand, the Latin below from John 2:17 really made us ponder the message which the Chronophage sent. It succinctly stated the essence of this timepiece: Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius which can be translated as ‘the world and its desires pass on’.

I made this clock the theme of my first assembly this year. I asked the girls at the end of my talk whether they had wasted those minutes I spent talking or had they contemplated what I had been saying? What about the previous Maths period? Were they better informed at the end of the period than at the beginning? Were they better water-polo players after their one hour practice than when they first dived into the pool at the beginning of practice? Are they just slightly better musicians at the end of the lesson than they were 30 minutes earlier?