accumulated momentum, an archaic configuration.

     The modern clock, mechanical in principle, embodied the 
wheel. The clock has ceased to have its older meanings and 
functions. Plurality-of-times succeeds uniformity-of-time. 
Today it is only too easy to have dinner in New York and 
indigestion in Paris. Travellers also have the daily experience of 
being at one hour in a culture that is still 3000 B.C., and at the 
next hour in a culture that is 1900 A.D. Most of North 
American life is, in its externals, conducted on nineteenth-
century lines. Our inner experience, increasingly at variance with 
these mechanical patterns, is electric, inclusive, and mythic in 
mode. The mythic or iconic mode of awareness substitutes the 
multi-faceted for point-of-view.

     Historians agree on the basic role of the clock in monastic