All Is as a Shadow: A Collection of Sayings on Sundials

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. In the early 1830s, Margaret Scott Gaddy took note of a sundial that was on the porch of the church that her husband pastored in Yorkshire, England.

And inscribed on that sundial were the rhyming Latin words, fugit hora ora. And that translates as, the hour flies, pray.

And a cottage nearby also had a sundial, but it bore a Latin inscription that translates as, there are no steps backward. And another neighbor had a sundial with the Latin words that translate as, I wait for no one. And Margaret Scott Gaddy was so intrigued by these inscriptions that she started collecting them. And then as often happens when you start collecting things, her friends started collecting them for her. And she went on to become a popular writer of children’s books, and she kept collecting those inscriptions. And in 1872, she published a beautiful, comprehensive book on the topic. It’s called The Book of Sundials, and it was later revised with her daughter’s help, and it’s just gorgeous. It’s full of fascinating information about sundials, and it includes 1,682 examples of sundial mottos.

And one of the things I love about these mottos, they’ve been described as more touching than tombstones. There’s something kind of meditative about them, a little bit melancholy, and a good reminder to be mindful of making the most of the hours that we have on earth. And I first became aware of them when I listened to the S-Town podcast where journalist Brian Reed interviews a clockmaker in Woodstock, Alabama, who points out that when you see a sundial, you should always go look at it because there will always be some kind of inscription on it.

And so I was thrilled to pieces when I came across this book. Yeah, the book is amazing. By the fourth edition, I think which was published in 1900, it is a phenomenal work. It’s beautiful to look at, amazing to read. Many of them are religious because sundials tend to appear in churchyards. And as you said, many of them talk about using your time wisely, but some of them don’t. One of my favorite ones is in German, but it translates into somewhat archaic English as, he hath made his choice aright, who counteth but the hours of light, basically saying, you can use your time well, but you should also make merry, which I think is important advice to all of us.

And there are the, well, the kind of mystical ones, like one written in Latin in a churchyard in southeastern France right on the border with Italy. It translates as the light makes shadow, but the truth makes mysteries, which makes you just want to turn right around and leave that churchyard pursued by who knows what. I don’t know what’s happening there. I just wanted to know what time it was. I forgot my watch.

It’s just interesting, all these brief ruminations on time and how we spend our time and what will become of us when our time is done. There are several beautiful copies of this book online. We’ll link to them from our website and you can explore them and find your favorite sundial mottos, or you can share little epigraphs or epigrams or little phrases or things that you found in your reading that you think are wonderful and that we should know about and that we can share with everyone else.

Let us know in email words@waywordradio.org or tell us on the telephone.

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