Fifty-One Tales · Chapter
Time and the Tradesman explained
Time encounters a tradesman artificially aging furniture in an antique shop, then punishes him by physically aging the man himself before departing to attend to a weary city.
What happens
Time encounters a tradesman artificially aging furniture in an antique shop, then punishes him by physically aging the man himself before departing to attend to a weary city.
Themes in this chapter
Time and Mortality
Time is personified as an active force that physically ages a man for imitating his work, emphasizing the inevitability and authority of time over human artifice.
The Futility of Human Ambition
The tradesman's attempt to counterfeit age is futile and met with swift punishment, underscoring the vanity of human efforts to rival or deceive time.
Characters to notice
- Time
Prowls the world, enters a furniture shop, and punishes the tradesman for imitating his work by aging him.
- Furrow-Maker
The tradesman is described as having a 'little cunning face' into which Time puts furrows.
Key passages
“Once Time as he prowled the world, his hair grey not with weakness but with dust of the ruin of cities, came to a furniture shop and entered the Antique department.”
Time, whose grey hair comes from the dust of destroyed cities rather than frailty, roams the earth and goes into the antique section of a furniture store.
Establishes Time as a powerful, wandering figure marked by the decay he has witnessed.
“And there he saw a man darkening the wood of a chair with dye and beating it with chains and making imitation wormholes in it.”
He observed a man staining wood, distressing it with chains, and drilling fake wormholes to make it look old.
Describes the tradesman's artificial aging techniques.
“And when Time saw another doing his work he stood by him awhile and looked on critically. And at last he said: “That is not how I work,” and he turned the man’s hair white and bent his back and put some furrows in his little cunning face; then turned and strode away, for a mighty city that was weary and sick and too long had troubled the fields was sore in need of him.”
Time watched the man critically, then declared the imitation inadequate. He aged the man instantly—whitening his hair, stooping his back, and wrinkling his face—before leaving to attend to a great, exhausted city that had long oppressed the countryside.
Time punishes the tradesman by imposing real age, then departs for a more significant task.