Intercalary Time

Disconcerting days between the periods of real time

Madeleine L’Engle distinguished her characters in A Wrinkle in Time by whether they belonged to Chronos (“ordinary, wrist-watch, alarm-clock time”) or Kairos (“real time, pure numbers with no measurement”). The distinction can be traced to the Greeks, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the Greek distinction inspired later conceptualizations, as the routinization, even imposition, of timekeeping in contemporary society is something no ancient could have conceived. Nevertheless, calendrical science was a hallmark of the civilizations great enough to merit mentions in any middle-school textbook—the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the Mesoamericans, the Mesopotamians—and the distinction between time categorized and kept and time as it happens and has happened is one familiar enough to anyone brought up in the habits of those civilizations’ descendants.

One problem with human-designed calendars is that they can never quite capture what they are supposed to without intervention. It would be nice if lunar and solar years came in pleasantly divisible and regular fractions. They do not. Three hundred and sixty five point two five and change days per year is annoying—so close to 360 (a beautiful number, full of divisors) and so far from perfection. Insist on a human-measurable and human-serving set of timekeeping (days, weeks, months, years) and one will quickly run into the problem that the days can fit into weeks, and depending on a preference for lunar or solar cycle the weeks can even fit more or less into days, but you won’t have neatly stacking units of days, weeks, months, and years.

The solution for timekeeping tends to involve kludges—the leap year, for instance, which is formally known as an “intercalary” year, and which sticks an extra day in the calendar every four years (excepting centennials but including quadricentennials). Increasing precision in calendars and the shift from measuring time from astronomical rotations to the vibrations of atoms made the leap second a necessary intercalary step, but the even greater precision of contemporary timekeeping practices means that this is too much of a hack and will eventually be replaced.

Other solutions are available. The Mayans preferred to have regular months (18 months of 20 days) with a special five-day month at the end of the year to make up 365 days (but without intercalation). The ancient(ish) Egyptians similarly had a special period of about five days to keep the lunar calendar synced to lunar observation. These times could be unsettling—the Egyptians, according to Wikipedia at least, had special superstitions about their intercalary month, while modern purveyors of woo-adjacent products will happily explain to you that the Mayans viewed their special month, Wayeb, as “time out of time” and “a time of cleansing our soul, our mind, our spirit, and our body, of course”.

Did the Mayans distinguish soul and spirit? I don’t know, but it is truly amazing how the ancient cultures of the past had so many traditions and perspectives that were so comfortable to the needs of contemporary upper-income consumer brackets. They were so wise. And how confusing that scholarly treatments of the subject tend to describe Wayeb as being perceived as “dangerous” and as times of “sickness, death or decay” when the “destruction of the universe loomed in the minds of the Maya”! Perhaps less confusing, of course, when we view calendar time as an attempt to regulate the natural world and intercalary or holiday periods as being a recognition of the futility of imposing human designs on the universe—but that, of course, means that those days were free of the protection and regularity that civilization itself is meant to project. Small wonder, then, that so similar a set of superstitions emerged in such distinctive civilizations around such similar periods.

The period between Christmas Day and January 2 strikes me as an unofficial, unrecognized, and very partial accommodation to reality. For the ancient cultivating civilizations, cyclical calendars accurately reflected the cyclical acceleration and deceleration of production. For a Fordist, or even a post-Fordist, economy, life revolves around coordinated and unceasing production, with a concomitant need for coordinated downtime. Having two major holidays so close together makes it difficult to accomplish anything work-related at the end of the year.

And so, for most of us in white-collar jobs, these last few days of the calendar year turn out to be a special time of about five days between the end of the old year and the beginning of the new one—just tacked on to December. Some employers recognize this for everyone; some simply acknowledge that many people will turn in their vacation days around this time.

For those who persevere into the office and for those who escape into nonwork delights alike, this week turns into an unusual time, one free-ish of work commitments but too short for work pressures to evaporate (and too full, perhaps, of nonwork obligations to be relaxing). There are few superstitions associated with the period—no special rituals to hold at bay the spirits unleashed by this time out of time, just cocoa and Hallmark movies—but the weightlessness of detachment from economic necessity is telling about where the force of gravity pulls.