For whom the bell tolls

"For whom the bell tolls" is a well-known and much used phrase in the English language. In 1940, Ernest Hemingway wrote a novel with that title, and he, in turn, took it from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,"Meditation XVII" which was published in 1624. Yes, the notion's be around for a while.

For most people in most places, tolling bells are a rarity. Oh sure, on Sunday you hear them a lot, but otherwise? In the little town I live in here in Southern Germany, however, you get to hear the bells a lot. There is a single small bell rung once at a quarter past the hour, twice at the half hour, three times and a quarter till the hour, and four times at the full hour. The the large bell chimes in tolling the hour itself. And, this goes on 24 hours every day of every year, that is, 365 days normally and 366 times in a leap year, for a grand total of 144,50 and 144,936 times, respectively. And this doesn't take into consideration the other times the bells are rung, such as before and after worship services or mass, the 3 o'clock ringing when someone in the community dies, or especially the three-minute continuous ringing at 7:00 am, noon and 6:00 pm (or 3 pm on Saturdays), which marks the starting, middle, and end of the workday.

The churches do the ringing (we have both Protestant and Catholic churches here), but it's not a church thing anymore. Pope Sabenius is credited with having the bells ring to mark the passage of the hours. They had always called to prayers and to mass, but this was something different, this was, as Gebser put it, the haptification of time, concretizing it, making time physical. I suppose the idea was to make us more aware of time and what we're doing with it.

We're only granted a limited amount of time during our sojourn on the planet, that's for sure. We were supposed to have learned, in school and elsewhere, that rare resources should be used with extreme care, but just like we're destroying our planet as a whole (like we had another one we could move to), we tend to waste most what we have the least of. We humans are simply downright weird like that.

So, when all is said and done, each and every time we hear a bell toll, we should think of Mr. Donne. We needn't ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for each and every one of us, and it should remind us of how precious time and life are. Too bad we hear them anymore. Well, I do, I must admit, thousands of times a year.