Life & Mortality Quote by William Faulkner

Faulkner takes a mundane object - the clock - and turns it into a weapon, which is exactly the kind of Southern Gothic trick he excels at: make the familiar feel predatory. "Clocks slay time" is a deliberate inversion of common sense. We think clocks measure time; Faulkner insists they murder it. The line is less metaphysics than indictment: modern life doesn’t just track our days, it chops them into compliant units, converting lived experience into an accounting system.

The subtext is a quarrel with mechanical certainty. Those "little wheels" are petty, almost laughable, yet their cumulative power is terrifying: they enforce schedules, wages, deadlines, the whole industrial discipline that tells you what a day is worth. As long as time is "clicked off", it’s not time as anyone actually feels it - elastic, haunted, recursive - but time as an external authority. Faulkner’s verb choice ("dead", "come to life") turns duration into a body, suggesting that measurement is a kind of embalming: neat, orderly, and fundamentally lifeless.

Context matters because Faulkner’s fiction is obsessed with the mismatch between clock-time and human time. In his world, the past doesn’t stay behind you; it pools in the present, contaminates it, repeats. The clock stopping isn’t just a breakdown. It’s a revolt: when the machinery fails, consciousness rushes back in, and time becomes what it always was for Faulkner’s characters - memory, guilt, desire, grief. Not progress, but persistence.