Daylight Saving Time vs Dali Time

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY (Salvador Dali)

The clocks were turned back this morning, for the last time (in my part of the world), the last Sunday in October. Next year, the clocks go back the first Sunday in November to further save energy and go forward the second Sunday in March rather than the first Sunday in April.

The main purpose of Daylight Saving Time (called "Summer Time" in many places in the world) is to make better use of daylight. We change our clocks during the summer months to move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening. Countries have different change dates.

If you live near the equator, day and night are nearly the same length (12 hours). But elsewhere on Earth, there is much more daylight in the summer than in the winter. The closer you live to the North or South Pole, the longer the period of daylight in the Summer. Thus, Daylight Saving Time (Summer Time) is usually not helpful in the tropics, and countries near the equator generally do not change their clocks.

My mind turned to works of art that featured time as a theme. Naturally, this piece by Dali entered first. Of course, time is a human construct and therefore subject to interpretation. Just ask my husband about DOUG TIME

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was a Catalan-Spanish artist best known for his surrealistic works where he created images from dreamscapes. He was deeply influenced by the theories of Freud about the unconscious especially as related to the erotic.

He is perhaps best known for The Persistence of Memory (1931)


One sees the image of the soft melting pocket watch. Dali was moved to include the famous melting- clock imagery after a vision he had following a snack of Camenbert cheese. The painting shows four soft watches, one of which has a fly showing that time flies and another is being devoured by ants that shows decay. This is widely seen as a commentary that time is less rigid than people usually assume.

In the center of the picture, under one of the watches, is a distorted human face in profile. This face, widely understood to be a self-portrait, also appears in Dalí's earlier work "The Great Masturbator." (taken from Wikipedia)

Dalí returned to the time theme of other paintings.