BLUE HILL, Maine — Our struggle against the clock is ancient. As far back as the 2nd century B.C., the Roman playwright Plautus lamented, “The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!” as he railed against the city’s central sundial, which served to “cut and hack my days so wretchedly.” Thousands of years later, what would Plautus make of this ringing, dinging world full of productivity apps that hack ever deeper into our days and nights?

The clock rose to power conjointly with a mounting yearning for certainty and order, dividing time with increasing accuracy into neat units that could be accounted for, spent, saved or wasted. Yet, while our contemporary zeal to Get Things Done (GTD) might spur efficiency, it comes at a cost. What could be gained from a single day set free from the clock’s tyranny, one spent wandering or daydreaming the hours away?

In the modern age, we’ve lost our taste for unfragmented time, the sort that Robert Louis Stevenson loved. He relished a day spent unaware of the hour, walking, pondering and lingering at the side of the road whenever the mood struck. During that drift, it seemed “almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw out clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more,” he wrote in 1876. “You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer’s day that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.”

Over the centuries, the illusion of mastering time through obedience to it came into acceptance. Across Europe, the medieval monastery’s bell tolled as a reminder to eat, sleep and pray. But while there must have been some soul’s release in relinquishing earthly sovereignty to that sound, as the clock’s authority spread, we sealed all the gaps through which curiosity might seep into our days. Curiosity, after all, could lure the susceptible way off track, as the Italian poet Petrarch learned in the spring of 1336, when he famously climbed Mont Ventoux, motivated by “nothing but the desire to see its conspicuous height.” One of the texts he carried along was Saint Augustine’s “Confessions,” detailing the moral dangers of such expeditions, when men “go out to admire the mountains,” or the course of the stars, and therein forget themselves. Chastened, Petrarch made his descent in silence.