28th of June, 1905

“Stop eating to much,” says the grandmother, tapping her son on the shoulder. “You’ll die before me and who will take care of my silver.” The family is having a picnic on the bank of the Aare, ten kilometers south of Berne. The girls have finished their lunch and chase each other around a spruce tree. Finally dizzy, they collapse in the thick grass, lie still for a moment, then roll on the ground and get dizzy again. The son and his very fat wife and the grandmother sit on a blanket, eating smoked ham, cheese, sourdough bread with mustard, grapes, chocolate cake. As the eat and drink, a gentle breeze comes over the river and they breathe in the sweet summer air. The son takes off his shoes and wiggles his toes in the grass.

Suddenly a flock of birds darts overhead. The young man leaps from the blanket and runs after them, without taking time to put on his shoes. He disappears over the hill. Soon he is joined by the others, who have spotted the birds from the city.

One bird has alighted in a tree. A woman climbs the trunk, reaches out to catch the bird, but the birds jumps quickly to another branch. She climbs farther up, cautiously straddles the branch and creeps outward. The bird hops back to the lower branch. As the woman hangs helplessly up in the tree, another bird has touched down to eat seeds. Two men sneak up behind it, carrying a bell jar. But the bird is too fast for them and takes to the air, merging again with the flock.

Now the birds fly through the town. The paster at St. Vincent’s Cathedral stands in the belfry, tries to coax the birds into the arched window. An old women in the Kleine Schanze gardens sees the birds momentarily roost in a bush. She walks slowly toward them with a bell jar, knows she has no chance of entrapping a bird, drops her jar to the ground and begins weeping.

And she is not alone in her frustration. Indeed, each man and each woman desires a bird. Because this flock of nightingales is time. Time flutters and fidgets and hops with these birds. Trap one of these nightingales beneath a bell jar and time stops. The moment is frozen for all people and trees and soil caught within.

In truth, these birds are rarely caught. The children, who alone have the speed to catch birds, have no desire to stop time. For the children, time moves too slowly already. The rush from moment to moment, anxious for birthdays and new years, barely able to wait for the rest of their lives. The elderly desperately wish to halt time, but are much too slow and fatigued to entrap any bird. For the elderly, time darts by much too quickly. They yearn to capture a single minute at the breakfast table drinking tea, or a moment when a grandchild is stuck getting out of her costume, or an afternoon when the winter sun reflects off the snow and floods the music room with light. But they are too slow. They must watch time jump and fly beyond reach.

On those occasions when a nightingale is caught, the catchers delight in the moment frozen. They savor the precise placement of family and friends, the facial expressions, the trapped happiness over a prize or a birth or romance, the captures smell of cinnamon or white double violets. The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear, flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.