Meridiem abolishes the dial. Every sixty seconds it takes the present moment — twenty-three minutes past four in the afternoon — and sets it in type across the whole of your screen, the way a compositor once set a headline: by hand, by eye, by feel.

Nothing here is arbitrary. The digits of the hour choose the composition — flush left, staircase, a scattered grid. The minute decides the scale of each word. The true position of the sun decides the ink and the paper. The clock is the designer; we only taught it manners.

And because a minute is a long time when you are watching one, the seconds keep quiet company at the edge — a hairline arc, filling and emptying, like breath. Stay until the minute turns. The letters leave the way they came: one by one, politely.