An inner clock - an internal time machine? How tiny this internal pacemaker would have to be - given that it functions even at monad level (see for example the marine dinoflagellate gonyaulax polydere). And how complex would we imagine this piece of mechanics in the

polycellular human animal, whose circadian clockwork adapts to the rhythm of the light, succumbing to it? Anyway, the way the world is going means that life in the light is decreasing rather than increasing - since artificial light (normal interior lighting in buildings: 50-500 lux)

is nothing more than chronobiological darkness with emergency lighting, compared to bright daylight (8,000-100,000 lux). No wonder that the pacemakers of our internal clockwork (located above the crossing of the optic nerves within the nucleus suprachismaticus,

controlling the rhythmical daily production of melatonin in the pineal gland) occasionally start to wonder what's going on. "Die Zeit macht nur vor dem Teufel halt", (Time only stops for the devil), as Udo Jürgens put it a long time ago (a German pop singer of the sentimental

denomination, vaguely comparable to Elton John, but completely unknown outside Germany). It is not really surprising that our Zeitalter der Angst breeds not only phobias such as sesquipedalophobia, the fear of long words, or arachibutyrophobia, the fear that your

peanut butter might get stuck on your palate (further details at http://www.phobialist.com), not just chronophobia (the very fear of time), but also chronometrophobia, the fear of timepieces. [At which point your translator was seized by a fit of

sesquipedalisententiophobia - the fear of long sentences...] And that gigantic industry, the big business of clocks and watches, has done a brilliant job in raising these fears:

ball clocks, wall clocks, pocket watches, church clocks, clepsydrae, pendulum clocks, grandfather's clocks, cuckoo clocks, clock radios, watches, wristwatches, pocket watches, stopwatches, Swiss watches, atomic clocks, digital clocks, analogue clocks, quartz watches, chronometers, chronoscopes, chronographs, repeaters, timepieces, sundials, horologes, hourglasses - and alarm clocks!

Considering all these time measuring devices, I remember a 60s TV series featuring a boy throwing a magic boomerang, which made the universe stand still as long as it was flying, leaving only the thrower capable of moving and acting. Ah well, I used to think (and still do), that's what the ideal time machine ought to be like: it should not be a machine to measure transience and volatility, even less a vehicle to jump around in time (itself nothing but the balance of space) like a chronically lost frog - but a time-stopping machine!

So far, however, boomerang-less contemporaries that we are, we can only contemplate the pendulum of our (external as well as internal) clock and gain a little pleasure

… from the moment in which the pendulum is hanging
motionless
suspended
free of gravity
at the edge of

…and from gazing at the wonders gathered in this box.
Enjoy it!

Yours,
Hartmut Kasper, PIPS-DADA-CORPORATION