A HISTORY OF TIME IN 10 CHAPTERS
A cigar is a cigar, a rose a rose, time is time.
But unlike roses and cigars, it gives forth neither scent nor stench, meaning nor definition. At best the mind can divide it using arithmetic and geometry, simple astronomy.
It begins or does not begin, ends but does not end, lacks a knowable source though in the imagination it can serve as a source itself, sometimes of consternation, sometimes of delight.
We can think forever about time but cannot touch it. But all is notlost: we can measure it by knots, ticks and tocks; mark it by chimes, gongs, heartbeats; graph it and arrange it in rows of intricate glyphs.
Rivers flood their banks, dry up; so much for the familiar comparison between time and a river, justified only by the latter’s one-way flow though Einstein and Hawking would dispute such an absolute claim, as well the many believers in time as circular. Or illusory.
It cannot fly, perch itself on hands, march, creep, be traded like money, get lost, take sides; despite Ovid’s claim that tempus edax rerum, time cannot devour anything, cannot be killed or caught in a bucket, is not a circus, a gypsy, a thief; can be neither out of joint nor “brisk and giddy-paced” (Twelfth Night), much as we would like to think so.
Abstract as space and quarks, marks of time can nonetheless be embedded in concrete matter. Ancient time carvers engraved lunar calendars on eagle bone fragments; notched calendar sticks have been discovered in places diverse as Siberia and Malaysia, the Maya and Aztecs were expert at embodying time in stone.
Long ago Father Time died, a wizened old man who had abandoned his family, taking up with a younger woman who worshipped him at first but wanted more sex, less paternalistic wisdom. His wife, not to be confused with Mother Time, took up rhythmic dancing, his children transformed themselves to metronomes to keep her performance in line.
Mother Time, a distant relative of the Old Woman in the Shoe, constantly gives birth to low-entropy baby multiverses, according to Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest of the Ultimate Theory of Time. She often insists on her full surname, Mother Space-Time.
The dead are likely free from time, except for the memories of the living, which rarely endure past two generations.
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