Momo witnesses the hour-lilies

Momo witnesses the hour-lilies in a vision that turns time from an abstract measure into a living, individual reality. Led by Professor Hora to the place where time comes from, she sees a pendulum draw flowers from a lake and hears the music that shapes their unfolding. On returning, she learns that this was not everyone’s time, but her own: every living soul has a corresponding inner place, though ordinary sight cannot reach it. The episode gives concrete form to the novel’s claim that time is life, and sets that intimate, generative reality against the Men in Gray’s attempt to make time an object of calculation and saving.

An Invitation into Time

The experience begins when Professor Hora offers Momo the chance to see where time comes from. She agrees, and he sets a condition: she must not speak or ask questions during the journey. His manner changes as he picks her up; he seems immensely tall and ancient, in a way the narration compares to a tree or a crag rather than to ordinary human aging. He covers her eyes and carries her through a long, dark tunnel. Momo senses the passage but feels safe, and what she first takes for the sound of her own heartbeats she gradually understands as the echoes of Professor Hora’s footsteps.

This passage prepares the vision without explaining it in advance. Momo is asked to suspend questions, but the scene does not make her a passive observer: she must attend closely to what appears and make sense of it through sight and hearing. The movement from the concealed tunnel to the place of time’s origin also marks a change in scale. Professor Hora’s familiar, clock-lined room gives way to a realm whose processes cannot be read from clocks alone.

The Pendulum and the Flowers

At the center of the vision, a shaft of light falls through an opening in a dome onto a circular lake. Above the water moves a gigantic pendulum, without any visible support. As it nears the lake’s edge, a waterlily bud rises from the depths. The bud opens wider as the pendulum approaches, becoming a fully opened flower on the surface. Momo sees a flower of extraordinary, multicoloured beauty and becomes absorbed in its appearance.

The scene presents the hour-lily as something that comes into being through a timed relation, not as a static ornament. The pendulum’s movement and the flower’s opening belong to one process: as the pendulum advances, a bud emerges and unfolds. The vision gives that process a distinct shape and pace, making the arrival of a flower an event rather than merely a mark on a clock face. Its gradual unfolding also holds Momo’s attention so fully that, for a time, the spectacle itself is all she can attend to.

The Music That Calls Each Hour-Lily

Momo becomes aware that the shaft of light can be heard as well as seen. What she first perceives as a distant sound grows into a complex music made of notes whose changing pitches form different harmonies. She recognizes it as the faraway music she had sometimes faintly heard while listening to the silence of a starry night. The music is not simply accompaniment to the flowers: Momo understands that the resonant light summons each bud from the lake’s depths and shapes it into a flower with its own distinct beauty.

As she listens, the sound resolves into increasingly particular voices. Some seem like notes made by precious metals; more remote and powerful voices follow. They speak in a language Momo has never learned but can understand. The sun, moon, planets, and stars tell her their true names, and those names express what they do and how their actions combine to make each hour-lily flower and fade. The episode thus connects an individual flower to a larger order: its brief life is part of a pattern involving the movements and interrelation of the celestial bodies. Its birth and passing are not presented as arbitrary losses but as the form time takes in this vision.

Momo’s Own Time

When Professor Hora carries Momo back to the clock-lined room, she struggles to describe what she has seen and says that everyone’s time seemed very large. Professor Hora corrects her: the vision was only her own time. There is a place like it in every living soul, but only those whom he takes there can reach it, and it cannot be seen with ordinary eyes. The clarification makes the vision both intimate and expansive. Momo has not surveyed a common store of hours; she has encountered the inner reality of one life, while learning that every other living person has a corresponding reality.

The distinction matters against the Men in Gray’s understanding of time. The novel first presents time as something clocks and calendars measure, while emphasizing that an hour can feel long or pass quickly depending on how it is lived. The Men in Gray know time’s value but act like leeches upon it, secretly invading people’s lives. Their advice to Mr Figaro turns that exploitation into daily practice: work faster, shorten visits and conversations, and subject the barbershop to a precise timetable. He follows their recommendations, stops enjoying his work, and organizes his assistants around the notice that time saved is time doubled. Yet the novel states that people save more and have less, because time is life itself and life resides in the human heart.

Momo’s vision gives that argument a different kind of evidence. The flowers and their music make time appear as a living process particular to each person, not a reserve that can be detached from relationships and held for later use. Professor Hora’s explanation does not claim that Momo has seen everyone’s inner world; it carefully limits the revelation to her own. That boundary preserves the personal nature of the vision while establishing its larger implication: the time the Men in Gray seek to appropriate belongs to living souls, each with a hidden place of its own.