IN (SLIGHT) PRAISE OF TARDINESS

A dillar, a dollar A ten o'clock scholar, What makes you come so soon? You used to come at ten o'clock, But now you come at noon.

--Mother Goose

THE message begins in the cradle and ends only in the grave: be on time. The early bird gets the worm. Time is money. Punctuality is the politeness of kings. Though our society has learned to excuse almost anything else, it still finds one sin--tardiness--unpardonable. It is as if we had collectively accepted Alice's harried, harassed White Rabbit ("Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I shall be too late!") as our model. Perhaps the only social canon of Emily Post's that still has all but universal acceptance is her dictum: "You must not be late!"

History is even more stern than Emily Post with the hapless laggard. Probably no battle has ever been won by the general who was late. "Time is everything," Lord Nelson said. "Five minutes makes the difference between victory and defeat." The French were kind enough to prove his point a few years later. If the dilatory Marshal Ney had beaten Blucher's Prussians to position at Waterloo, the battle could have ended in a French victory, and Wellington might have taken Bonaparte's lease on the house at St. Helena. Similarly, if Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart had shown up at Gettysburg when he was supposed to, instead of galloping his cavalry hither and yon through the quiet backwoods of Pennsylvania, General Robert E. Lee might have won the Civil War's most crucial battle. Richmond today might be the capital of the Confederate States of America.

In the clock-conscious societies of the industrial West, woe greets the individual who defies the hallowed laws of punctuality. The Germans, who hold timeliness next to godliness, were infuriated by the constant tardiness of Senator Edward Kennedy and his wife during a semiofficial visit last April. Together and separately, the two Kennedys observed only one rule--to be late, sometimes by one or two hours, for every engagement. "The honorable Senator," observed a columnist in the Frankfurter Allgemeinc Zeitung, all of his umlauts drawn into an angry frown, "came, saw, and did not conquer." The Kennedys are not the only public figures who could use a personal timekeeper; so could Senator Hubert Humphrey and Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger. Actress Marilyn Monroe was notorious for never showing up for any appointment on time. Similarly tardy was Poet Dylan Thomas, who was not always able to pass up one more for the road.

Why are some people always late? Why are some people always on time? Depending on whom one asks, the answer is in the stars, the psyche or the cold eye of reason. In eight cases out of ten, asserts Astrologist Linda Goodman (Sun Signs), people who were born under Aries, Gemini, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius and Pisces will be late most of the time. A Leo will be punctual and tardy in equal measure. "No one," she says, "tells the lion what to do."

Nonsense, say the Freudians, who trace tardiness and punctuality--like almost everything else--back to childhood. The person who is habitually late may be rebelling against his parents and, by extension, against all authority, especially the authority of the clock. For him lateness can be a covert expression of his aggression. The compulsive clock watcher, on the other hand, has the same desire to rebel; unlike the latecomer, he suppresses it and submits to authority. Freud himself had a particular fear of traveling (known as Reisefieber) and usually showed up at railroad stations too early. The underlying reason, according to his biographer. Analyst Ernest Jones, was that Freud feared losing his home and ultimately his mother's breast--a "panic of starvation, which must have been in its turn a reaction to some infantile greed." Poor Freud! What would he have done if he had had to while away his anxieties in an airline terminal, listening to tinned music and scratchy announcements of flight cancellations? Analysis might never have progressed past the anal stage.

In many social circumstances not being on time can be a very useful ploy. With a dramatically ostentatious late arrival, a person can virtually guarantee that he will be noticed by other guests or colleagues. It is hard to make a grand entrance if you are the first to arrive. Conversely, lateness can be used as a cover-up for shyness. A bashful latecomer may hope that he will not be noticed, slipping into the room quietly, like a guilty Ariel, and hiding himself in the crowd. There are other advantages as well. Since most parties have dull beginnings, the late arriver can spare himself short eternities of throat-clearing ennui. At occasions that involve speeches, he can also avoid yawning stretches of dull and usually empty rhetoric.

Whatever his motive, the tardy person always runs the risks of mistiming and misjudgment; it takes an expert in unpunctuality to know how late is too late. The novice may find that his grand entrance coincides with a general exit, or that his quest for invisibility puts him instead into a pitiless spotlight of glares.

Knowing precisely when one should arrive is one of mankind's smaller but more persistent social problems. In New York and most other urban areas of the East, for example, an invitation for dinner at 8 really means 8:30; the hostess would be stunned, perhaps even destroyed, by prompt arrival. A "sixish" party at East Coast summer resorts seldom begins before 7--and guests are on time if they show up before midnight. In the West or Midwest, however, the time declared on an invitation normally means what it says, within five or ten minutes.

Outside the U.S.. the problems are only compounded. Germans tend to be on time to the second; the English tend to be either five minutes late or five minutes early. To be too exact is to be, well, a bit Teutonic, but to be more than ten minutes late without a good excuse is inexcusably rude. In South America and the Latin countries of Europe, however, it is almost too difficult to be too late. If a hostess wants her guests to be prompt --meaning half an hour or so after the stated time--she specifies an "English hour," or sometimes in Latin America, an "American hour." The Russians are equally relaxed about time. In the Middle East, an invitation often does not even include the time, but can be "Come for the evening." For the host or hostess to fix a minute or even an hour implies that the guest is not wanted before then, an unforgivable breach of hospitality.

It is unlikely that the English would ever accept a Spanish dinner hour -- gazpacho at 11--or that the Spanish would even look at a Yorkshire pudding at the ungodly hour of 7:30. There are signs, however, that the concept of time is moving, albeit slowly, toward something like a global standard. In the supposedly languid Orient, industrial Japan adheres to a Germanic punctuality, while mainland China moves at a much brisker pace than it did before the Communist revolution. In Latin countries, even the siesta may one day yield to technological advance and a yearning for managerial efficiency. IBM, alas, has yet to invent a computer that grows drowsy after a heavy, wine-laden lunch--or unplugs itself for a 4 o'clock dalliance and an exchange of punch cards with a Univac down the hall.

Still, it is not only possible but probable that a post-industrial society will unshackle itself from bondage to the tyranny of the clock. Already the U.S., the pioneer in such matters, is losing some of its traditional reverence for punctuality. America's airlines are beginning to follow the lead of the nation's railroads in operating on almost Oriental time schedules. Appliance repairmen are as devoted to the manana principle as Mexican peons: department stores promise delivery of goods in weeks rather than days; the Post Office makes the Pony Express seem like the very model of rapid transit. The wait for a dial tone or an operator can be a foretaste of purgatory. For some parts of industry, the process of slowing down may be just a matter of inefficiency and indifference. For the counterculture, with its commitment to a more organic way of life, it is a matter of ethics and aesthetics. Like Rousseau, that protohippie of the Enlightenment, the young are throwing away (or at least not winding) their watches and proclaiming their liberation.

They are right, to the extent at least that time ought to be man's servant, not his master. An obsession with the second hand is a form of enslavement --and not the most subtle form at that. For all the frustrations it may cause, a sweeping disregard for punctuality may be a sign that the U.S. is beginning to relax a bit and is starting to reassess the quaint notion that speed is progress. If so, would that really be a national disgrace? We may never go so far as to resurrect the Egyptian shadow clock, which probably wouldn't work in today's smog anyway, and we probably will not soon imitate the Cree Indians, who did not even count the days when they could not see the moon. But we may revise Mother Goose and give that ten o'clock scholar a tolerant smile, if not a gold star.

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