In the autumn of 1853 Thomas Butler Gunn got lost-temporarily rather than physically. On a visit to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and isolated from the outside world, his diary quickly divorced the time order of reality. Wednesdays are repeated and days go mislabelled. It took around a fortnight, and renewed contact with civilization, for Gunn to restore his weekly bearings.
The episode(经历), says David Henkin, suggests how fragile a sense of time can be-especially when it comes to weeks. Unlike months or years, these seven-day groupings have no real basis in astronomy. People from Nigeria to China have lived well without them.
And yet the week has become the measure not only of routine, but even of wisdom. "Weekly rhythms have become so thoroughly absorbed into ordinary human experience," Mr Henkin writes, "that forgetting what day it is constitutes a singular symptom and feeling of disorientation (迷失方向). " His new book shows how the week came to rule the world.
But when newspapers, factory schedules and weekly paydays were all rarer, the weekly structure was less important. People got confused. As late as 1866, the Louisville Courier mentioned a man getting drunk on Friday because he thought it was Saturday.
As towns grew and society became more complicated, citizens "became differently and more intensely week-oriented, in ways we can now recognize as modern". When his local charity met on Wednesdays in 1859, and choral concerts were scheduled for Fridays, James Fiske of Massachusetts couldn't afford to mix up his days. Japan formally adopted the seven-day system only in 1873; all the same, a character in a novel by Haruki Murakami is as sure of something "as I am sure that today is Wednesday".
