ArticleTaming Time

While having covered almost 80 wonders, I have so far stayed away from the Original Seven. It was a conscious choice, as this blog's mandate is to do justice to less known and often underappreciated wonders rather than promote the already famous ones. However, time has come to pay indirect tribute to the only extant - and therefore, most famous - Wonder of the Ancient World, the Pyramids. It's not a coincidence that the words “time” and “Pyramids” met in the same sentence - the relationship between the two concepts has been extremely long and very complex, as explained by the following saying: “Everything is afraid of Time but even Time itself is afraid of the Pyramids!” The word “afraid” clearly indicates that Time is mostly perceived as a hostile force, one to conquer or be conquered by. While that's definitely the case for any living creature or almost any individual object, there is one particular category that completely reverses the trend: Time turns into a friend and an ally when it comes to institutions steeped in tradition, such as Trinity College in Dublin.

There is an opinion ascribed to an anonymous gardener: “It's very easy to create a perfect English Garden. All you have to do is to plant grass and then cut it regularly…for about 300 years!” It turns out that a similar approach can apply to an educational institution. Trinity must have looked somewhat different back in 1592 when it was founded - less buildings and hardly any playgrounds or parking lots (students would arrive on foot or in a horse carriage rather than by bus or in a private car) - but its essence has mostly remained the same over those four centuries. Classes and labs filled with students, professors in mantles, cases of exam fever, and wild celebrations following graduations and newly obtained degrees. Changes were few and really far between, the most important of them arguably being granting admission to women in 1904 - a breakthrough not easy to achieve in a conservative society. There was a lot of opposition, and it was led by none other than the then Provost of the College, George Salmon who vowed that “women will study in this College over my dead body!” A famous mathematician and theologian, Salmon lived 84 years and died in his office on January 22, 1904 - the very day the first group of women was writing their entrance exam in an adjacent building. It goes without saying that female students were quite impressed by Salmon's power of prediction - years later, some of them showed their appreciation by dancing in front of his statue and decorating it with a pink scarf…  

As professors continued to teach, and students continued to learn and graduate, Time kept doing one and only positive thing it can do really well - namely, building Trinity's reputation.  Several centuries later that work was complete. When the famous Book of Kells was rescued from a peat bog, it was entrusted in Trinity's care. When the University Philosophical Society founded in 1863 decided to invite a celebrity, it would be in a position to pick and choose, in most cases. It did take some time to convince Bono to appear but, for instance, President Biden was happy to oblige…