Saturday, June 03, 2006

Time's voice returned


Developer update.
The efforts of three earnest young men to carpet the backyard of Woolen Mill Village Lot #1 with dwelling units continue apace. Busy as beavers they are.
The proposed project's design has changed for the better, but its poison bolus aspects remain.
In a neighborhood that has been defined by its rural feel and folkways for 200 years the New Urbanist Trio hopes to install housing at a rate eight times as dense as the neighborhood average.
Once upon a time, a time miser lived in the house on top of the hill.
Did Jefferson fear time, did he love time? I suspect he danced with time. He always had a timepiece nearby, slept with a clock at the foot of his bed. He managed time as well as any human can.
He had this wonderful seven day clock mounted at his front door. Inside it told the day, the hour, the minute and the second. Outside the clock had an hour hand and an aural component. The clock is said to have audibly announced the hour, with a resounding gong.
How I would like time's voice returned.
In former days the sound was audible from the Mill Village.
Warren Graves yard, ground zero for the present volley from the development class, is closer to Monticello than to The Paramount.
The passage of time takes all sentient beings but it does not have to destroy the fabric of history.
"The Chinese have a thing made of a kind of bell metal, which they call a Gong, and is used as a bell at the gates of large houses, &c. It is in fact precisely of the shape and size of a camp oven, about 20. I. diameter and 5. I. deep . . . I wish for one to serve as the bell to a clock, which might be heard all over my farm. . ."--Th. Jefferson


(posts from the development front)

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