Traveling Eternity Road
But do you remember? “Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal; an you smile not, he’s gagged?” and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
We exist in the immediate: our senses experience time as what is happening right now, in this instance. Memory allows us to relive past immediacies in the present, albeit imperfectly, as our recollection of an event may be corrupted by inaccuracies, or fade, like old film, making once-sharp details blur into a background haze. The vast distances between objects in our universe allows astronomers to look into the past; geology and paleontology gives scientists snapshots of land features and creatures from long ago: this is the realm of Deep Time, a place that human minds can only grasp in the abstract. What does the passage of eons mean to creatures that fall to dust after only eighty years?
For the vast majority of human beings, time exists on the scale of the personal - three or four generations, at most. Beyond personal memory we venture into family legend and historical myth. "The Good Old Days..."
Some of us look back further. I have a BA in history, and before that, years of reading about history, both human and natural. Like many children I had a fascination with dinosaurs, which led me to the history of life on Earth; I have a particular fondness for the "Cambrian Explosion" and the Burgess Shale. Five hundred million years - does that even register in our brains? I'm reminded of the rabbits from "Watership Down" who can grasp numbers up to four but refer to anything greater, be it five or one million, as "hrair". How many zeroes following a number does it take before we lose understanding of time?
I'm just a casual observer of the world around me. I don't have any profound insights into reality or nature or the universe or god(s) or the past or the future. But I do observe, and form opinions, and, on occasion, write those opinions down.
Whirligig of time indeed. Chaotic and meandering? Yup. That's me.
We exist in the immediate: our senses experience time as what is happening right now, in this instance. Memory allows us to relive past immediacies in the present, albeit imperfectly, as our recollection of an event may be corrupted by inaccuracies, or fade, like old film, making once-sharp details blur into a background haze. The vast distances between objects in our universe allows astronomers to look into the past; geology and paleontology gives scientists snapshots of land features and creatures from long ago: this is the realm of Deep Time, a place that human minds can only grasp in the abstract. What does the passage of eons mean to creatures that fall to dust after only eighty years?
For the vast majority of human beings, time exists on the scale of the personal - three or four generations, at most. Beyond personal memory we venture into family legend and historical myth. "The Good Old Days..."
Some of us look back further. I have a BA in history, and before that, years of reading about history, both human and natural. Like many children I had a fascination with dinosaurs, which led me to the history of life on Earth; I have a particular fondness for the "Cambrian Explosion" and the Burgess Shale. Five hundred million years - does that even register in our brains? I'm reminded of the rabbits from "Watership Down" who can grasp numbers up to four but refer to anything greater, be it five or one million, as "hrair". How many zeroes following a number does it take before we lose understanding of time?
I'm just a casual observer of the world around me. I don't have any profound insights into reality or nature or the universe or god(s) or the past or the future. But I do observe, and form opinions, and, on occasion, write those opinions down.
Whirligig of time indeed. Chaotic and meandering? Yup. That's me.
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