The Table of Corrections

by Albert Einstein, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

If you stood at the pump in the middle of the square at Hürliwil, you could see two clocks without turning your head. On your left was the church, and high in its tower was the old painted dial, blue with gold numbers, which Christian Bärtschi wound every morning. On your right was the new station of the Lake Thun railway. It had been open less than a year and still smelled of varnish. Over its door hung a white enamel clock with black hands, and that one belonged to Emil's father.

The two clocks did not agree. The church was a minute and a half ahead, if you believed the railway. The railway was a minute and a half behind, if you believed Christian Bärtschi. In the spring of 1894 Emil Wyss was eleven years old, and he had spent a good part of that spring standing at the pump and trying to decide which of them to believe.

He had a method. He waited until the big hand of the church clock stood exactly on the twelve and began to count, one-and, two-and, until the big hand of the station clock reached the twelve as well. The count came out at about ninety. Some days it was eighty-four and some days it was ninety-six, but Emil thought that was his counting and not the clocks. He wrote the numbers in the back of his arithmetic book, where his teacher would not look.

"You will wear out the pump," said Frau Kunz from the bakery doorway. She had a tray of bread on her hip. "Every day standing there with your mouth open."

"I am measuring."

"Measure the bread," she said, and gave him the end of a loaf, which was burnt and which nobody would buy anyway.

---

The letter came on a Tuesday in the middle of May. Emil knew it was important because his father read it at the supper table, which was not allowed, and because his mother let him.

Gottfried Wyss was a careful man with a careful moustache. He read the letter twice, folded it, and laid it beside his plate, and then he unfolded it and read it a third time.

"Well?" said Emil's mother.

"On the night of the thirty-first of May," his father said, "at midnight, every clock on the railway goes forward by thirty minutes. All of Switzerland. The Federal Council has decided." He tapped the letter. "We are to keep the time of Middle Europe. The same as the Germans and the Italians."

"Thirty minutes," said Emil's mother. "So we lose half an hour of sleep."

"Nobody loses anything. The trains run as before. Only the numbers are different."

"Then why change them?" said Emil.

His father looked at him. It was the look he gave a passenger who wanted to know why the train from Interlaken could not wait five minutes for his sister. Then something changed in his face, and he put the letter down.

"Think of a man in Freiburg, in Germany," he said, "who takes the train to Basel. When he leaves Freiburg it is one o'clock, by the Germans, who have been half an hour ahead of us since last spring. He travels for an hour. He gets out at Basel and looks at our clock, and it says half past one. So he has travelled for an hour and his journey has taken half of one. He misses his connection. He writes a letter to the newspaper." His father smiled a little under the moustache. "The Federal Council does not like letters to the newspaper."

Emil thought about this. He saw the man quite clearly, a fat man in a brown coat, getting off a train in Basel with his watch in his hand and his mouth open.

"And the church?" he said.

His father picked up his fork again. "The church is not the railway."

---

The church was not the railway, but the commune council of Hürliwil decided, on the Thursday, that the church should keep the same time as the railway, so that people coming to the station from the upper village would not miss their trains. The council was Herr Zbinden, who was president, and three farmers, and the schoolmaster. They voted four to one. The schoolmaster was the one.

Herr Zbinden did not want to tell Christian Bärtschi. Nobody wanted to tell Christian Bärtschi. In the end Emil's father wrote a note, very politely, in his best hand, and gave it to Emil, because a boy can be sent up a tower and a stationmaster cannot.

There were ninety-one steps. Emil counted them. Near the top they turned to wood, and the wood was worn into hollows in the middle of each tread, so that you could see where four hundred years of feet had gone. Then there was a trapdoor, and above the trapdoor the clock.

It lived in a room of its own, a wooden cage of wheels and iron bars as big as a farm cart, and it ticked so slowly and so loudly that it seemed less like a clock than like something breathing in its sleep. The pendulum went down through a slot in the floor into the darkness. The room smelled of oil and pigeons.

Christian Bärtschi was sitting on a stool beside it with a rag in his hands. He was a small man, older than anyone Emil knew except his own grandmother, with white stubble and very clean fingernails. He read the note while Emil got his breath back. Then he folded it into a small square and put it in his waistcoat pocket, where it made a lump.

"Come," he said. "I will show you something."

He took Emil to the south window of the tower. There was a wooden shutter over it, and in the shutter somebody, a long time ago, had bored a hole no bigger than a pea. On the stone sill below ran a line of brass, let into the stone, polished bright.

"When the spot of sun lies on this line," said Bärtschi, "it is noon in Hürliwil. Not in Bern. Not in Berlin. Here. The sun stands over the Morgenberghorn, exactly south, and the spot lies on the line, and I look at my clock, and if my clock does not say twelve, I make it say twelve."

It was half past ten, by either clock. The spot of sun lay on the sill a hand's width to the west of the brass line, small and round and very bright, like a coin someone had dropped. Emil watched it. It did not seem to move at all. Then he looked away at the clockwork and back again, and it had moved.

"But that is not all," said Bärtschi. He went to the wall beside the trapdoor. Pasted there, brown with age and fly-spotted, was a printed sheet with columns of small numbers. Across the top it said Zeitgleichung, and under that the months of the year. Beside each date there was a number of minutes and seconds, and a plus or a minus.

"The sun is not punctual either," said Bärtschi. "Nobody tells you this. In May she comes early, three minutes, nearly four. In the middle of June she is on time. In July she is late, six minutes and more, and in November she is early again, a whole quarter of an hour. Every day I look at the spot, and then I look at this table, and then I set the clock. I forgive the sun. She has a long way to go."

He tapped the sheet with a clean fingernail. The paper under his finger was worn soft, as if he had tapped it there a great many times.

"So," he said. "Now you understand. If I move the hands thirty minutes forward, then tomorrow the spot will lie on the brass and my bell will say half past twelve. A clock that lies to the sun. Tell your father that. Tell him politely. Tell him Christian Bärtschi thanks him for his letter."

---

Emil told his father. His father said, "Hm," which was what he said about weather in the Bernese Oberland, and about Herr Zbinden.

"He has a table," Emil said. "For the sun."

"Yes, I expect he does."

"He corrects the sun every day. By minutes. So it is not really the sun's time either. It is the sun's time and then the table."

His father looked up from the timetable he was correcting. Emil had the feeling that he had said something important, but he did not know what it was, and his father only said, "Eat your soup."

---

That night Emil lay in bed and could not sleep, and the reason he could not sleep was the fat man from Basel.

He thought: the fat man leaves Freiburg at one o'clock. He arrives in Basel at half past one. But the train has been going for an hour. The wheels have gone round a certain number of times. The fat man has breathed a certain number of times. If he had boiled an egg on the train, the egg would be hard. Whatever the clocks say, the egg knows how long it has been.

He saw it: a train like a long dark line on a map, and above Freiburg a clock, and above Basel another clock, and the two clocks with their hands in different places, and in the middle a hard-boiled egg, which did not care.

You could change the names. You could paint new numbers on every clock in Switzerland, as the Federal Council was about to do. But you could not make the egg softer.

He lay with this for a long while. It was very pleasant, like a smooth stone in the pocket. Then he got up in his nightshirt and wrote in the back of his arithmetic book, under the column of ninetys: The egg does not care. In the morning he could not remember why, but he did not cross it out.

---

It was the schoolmaster who told him about Bärtschi's wife, though not on purpose. The schoolmaster was explaining to Herr Zbinden, on the steps of the schoolhouse, why he had voted against the council, and Emil was sitting on the bottom step pretending to read.

"It is the register," said the schoolmaster. "He keeps the church book, you know that. Every birth, every marriage, every death in this parish for forty years, and every one of them with the hour, by his clock. His own children are in there. Elisabeth is in there." He lowered his voice, but not much, because the schoolmaster had a voice made for the back of a schoolroom. "Ten minutes past four in the morning, the eleventh of March, 'seventy-nine. He wrote it himself, Zbinden. He went down from the tower and wrote it, with the doctor still in the house. And now you want him to go and tell his clock that it was always half an hour wrong."

"Nobody says it was wrong," said Herr Zbinden.

"That is what it will mean to him."

Herr Zbinden went away rubbing the back of his neck. Emil sat on the step and looked at the church. From there you could see only the blue dial and not the station clock, so for a moment there was only one time in Hürliwil, and it was twenty past eleven.

---

On the evening of the thirty-first of May the whole village knew that the railway clocks would move at midnight, and most of the village intended to stay up and watch, and most of the village did not. By eleven the square was empty except for Emil's father, who had a ladder and a lantern and the long key for the station clock, and Emil, who was supposed to be asleep.

"You will hold the lantern," said his father, who had known all along that he would not be asleep.

They waited in the station office. The telegraph instrument sat on its table under a cloth, like a parrot. Emil's father had his pocket watch open on the desk beside it, and every so often he looked at the watch and then out of the window at the enamel clock over the door, though they had agreed with each other perfectly all day. At a quarter to twelve the telegraph woke and clattered, and his father bent over it and read the tape and said, "Thun is ready. Spiez is ready." He seemed pleased that Thun and Spiez were ready.

At five to twelve they went out. Emil held the lantern up and his father climbed the ladder and opened the little glass door on the face of the clock. Then they waited again.

Across the square the church was dark. Its dial was a pale circle against the sky and the hands could just be seen, a minute and a half ahead, as always. There was a light in the tower window, a small one, near the top.

At midnight by the railway his father put his finger on the minute hand and pushed it, slowly, round the bottom of the dial and up the other side, until it stood at the six. It made a small dry ticking as it went. Then he closed the glass door and came down the ladder.

"There," he said. "Half past twelve. The first of June." He looked at his watch, and moved that too, carefully, with his thumbnail. "We are Europeans."

Emil looked at the church. The light was still in the tower. At midnight by the church, a minute and a half after midnight by the old railway, which was now half past twelve and a minute and a half by the new one, the bell began to strike. Emil counted twelve. The sound went out over the dark lake and came back off the far shore, softer, a little late.

"He has not moved it," said Emil.

"No," said his father. "Go to bed."

Emil did not go to bed. He went up the tower.

---

The trapdoor was open. Bärtschi was on his stool with a candle on the floor beside him, and he was not doing anything. The clock went on breathing. On his knees lay a big book bound in dark leather, closed.

He did not seem surprised to see Emil. He looked at him for a while, and then he said, "Your father has moved his."

"Yes."

"And now the whole of Switzerland is half past twelve, except for this room." He said it without bitterness. "Sit, if you are going to stay. You are letting the draught up."

Emil sat on the top step with his feet on the ladder. He had prepared nothing to say. He had thought, coming up the ninety-one steps in the dark, that he would explain about the fat man and the egg, but now that he was here it seemed a stupid thing to say to an old man in the middle of the night with his book on his knees.

So instead he said, "How long was she ill?"

Bärtschi turned his head slowly and looked at him. For a moment Emil thought he would be sent down. Then the old man opened the book. He did not have to look for the place. The book fell open there by itself, the way the paper on the wall was worn soft where his finger went.

"The doctor came at ten in the evening," he said. "It was snowing. I remember the snow on his hat. And she died at ten past four. I wrote it here." He turned the book towards the candle, and Emil saw a line of brown ink in a small square hand. Elisabeth Bärtschi-Gerber. 4 Uhr 10 morgens.

"Six hours," said Emil. "And ten minutes."

"Six hours and ten minutes."

"If you move the clock," said Emil, "will it still be six hours and ten minutes?"

The clock ticked. The pendulum went down into the dark and came back.

"It will say that the doctor came at half past ten," said Bärtschi at last. "And that she died at twenty to five."

"But it will still be six hours and ten minutes."

"Yes."

"And the spot of sun," said Emil, and now it was coming out of him faster than he could arrange it, the way a song does when you stop thinking about the words, "the spot of sun isn't the time either. Not really. You told me. You look at the spot and then you look at the table and then you add three minutes, or you take away six, and that is what goes on the clock. So it was never only the sun. It was always the sun and the table. And now the table has one more line in it. That's all. It says, add thirty."

He stopped. He was out of breath, though he had been sitting down.

Bärtschi did not say anything for a long time. He looked at the book, and at the candle, and at the brown sheet on the wall beside the trapdoor, which in the candlelight was almost black. Then he made a small sound in his throat. Emil thought at first that it was the beginning of crying, and he was frightened. But it was not crying. The old man was laughing, very quietly, the way you laugh at something that has beaten you fairly at cards.

"Add thirty," he said. "Forty years I add and I subtract, and a boy from the railway comes up my tower in his nightshirt to tell me how to add."

"I'm not in my nightshirt."

"No," said Bärtschi, looking at him. "That is true. You are dressed. You knew you would come up." He closed the book. "Well. Not tonight."

"Why not tonight?"

"Because I set my clock at noon," said Bärtschi. "Forty years I have set it at noon, when the sun is on the brass. Not at midnight because a wire says so. Go home."

---

The first of June was a confusing day in Hürliwil. Frau Kunz opened the bakery by the church, which was the only time she had ever known, and the morning train came in by the station, which was half an hour ahead of her, so that the people from the upper village arrived at the platform with no bread, angry, and then at the bakery with no train, angrier. The schoolmaster rang the school bell by his own watch, which he had moved, and half his pupils came by the church and missed arithmetic, which Emil did not regret. Herr Zbinden walked back and forth across the square between the two clocks with his hat in his hand, looking up at one and then the other.

Emil went to the pump at a quarter to twelve. It was a quarter past eleven by the church. He did not know which to call it any more, so he simply stood and watched the blue dial.

At noon by the sun, a little before twelve by the church, he saw a shape move behind the south window of the tower. A little later he saw the minute hand on the blue dial begin to move. It went slowly, smoothly, without the small dry ticking of the station clock, round the bottom of the dial and up the other side. Halfway round it stopped, as if someone had taken his hand from it to rest, and then it went on. As it passed the top of the dial the bell began to strike, and everybody in the square stopped and looked up.

It struck twelve. The hand went on, and came to rest a little short of the six.

Emil did not look at the station clock. He watched the blue dial, and the bakery door, and Herr Zbinden with his hat in his hand, and waited. When the big hand on the blue dial stood exactly on the six, the bell gave a single stroke for the half hour, and he began to count, one-and, two-and, while he turned his head to the right.

The big hand on the white enamel was still short of the six. He counted until it got there. Eighty-eight.

He took out the arithmetic book and the stub of pencil, and under The egg does not care he wrote the date, the first of June, and beside it, carefully, 88.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Albertō Einsteinō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Albert Einstein, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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