It’s 9 o’clock in the morning in Roussillon, a small village in Provence, in the South of France. . As happens with clock towers around the world, when the little hand reaches 9 and the big hand reaches 12, the bell here rings 9 times. But here’s an odd thing: two and A half minutes from now, the bell will chime out the hour again.

The people at the local tourism office tell me why.

(audio) l’epoque quand les gens travaillaient dans les champs. Donc la cloche sonnait un premier coup pour dire l’heure, et les gens, qui entendaient sonner n’avaient pas forcement le temps de compter les coups pour savoir l’heure qui etait. Donc ca sonnait une deuxieme fois et les gens etaient attentifs aux deuxieme coup puis que la, il faut compter les heures et il savaient l’heure effectivement. Passait quelques minutes – deux minutes

It was back in the time when people worked in the fields, the...
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SUGGESTED HOST INTRO: Chances are that no matter where you are at this moment, there's an object within easy eyesight that tells you the time – your computer, your VCR, your alarm clock radio, or the clock on the dashboard.

But as independent producer Jackson Braider sees it, it doesn’t matter how hard the world tries to tell you the time, the only clocks that really count are the ones you actually hear. His piece is part of Think Global, public radio's week of special coverage.

@@@@@@@ It’s 9 o’clock in the morning in Roussillon, a small village in Provence, in the South of France. . As happens with clock towers around the world, when the little hand reaches 9 and the big hand reaches 12, the bell here rings 9 times. But here’s an odd thing: two and A half minutes from now, the bell will chime out the hour again. The people at the local tourism office tell me why. (audio) l’epoque quand les gens travaillaient dans les champs. Donc la cloche sonnait un premier coup pour dire l’heure, et les gens, qui entendaient sonner n’avaient pas forcement le temps de compter les coups pour savoir l’heure qui etait. Donc ca sonnait une deuxieme fois et les gens etaient attentifs aux deuxieme coup puis que la, il faut compter les heures et il savaient l’heure effectivement. Passait quelques minutes – deux minutes It was back in the time when people worked in the fields, they say. When the clock sounded the first time, the workers would not necessarily have started counting the strikes to know the time. So, the clock sounded again, and this second time the people were ready.. They could count the hours and know the time. (ticking clock) At first, it looks so natural – happy peasants collecting the harvest beneath the bright provencal sky, stopping to hear the hour. But there's something odd about farmers straining to hear the time the way, say, the office workers of Boston do. (Westminster chime) There’s no doubt about it: Over the centuries, we have all been trained to hear time. Even into the digital age, we still listen for the bell. Why? Because when it rings, we know what time it REALLY is, regardless of what our watches say. Bells tell us where we are in our day – they tell us where we're SUPPOSED to be, and they tell us where everyone else is, too. The start of class, the end of the shift, the call to prayer – When we hear the time, we join, we synchronize with our communities. (alarm clock ring) Of course today our communities are as big as the world itself. When I turn on my computer, for instance, the machine automatically links to the internet to check the time. My kitchen clock sets itself to a faint radio signal broadcast by the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. (ticking clock) Long ago the British learned that to rule the world, all they needed was a good compass and a good clock. Now we take the good clock for granted. We always know what time it is. And we know what to do when the bell tolls. Because nothing stands still for anyone -- least of all time. No sooner is the bolt of cloth cut at the mill than it’s shipped to a factory in Sri Lanka where a seamstress is just now cutting the last thread on a batch of oxford cloth shirts before they’re packed and crated and launched on the return journey eastward. For all this to work, everything has to be right on time all over the world. If one of us stops, the whole global machine might come to a crashing halt. But is that really true? I think about the village bell in southern France. Does it really matter if we pause for a minute -- or for two and a half minutes -- even if it’s just to hear what the time really is? (Roussillon bell) I'm Jackson Braider.