Marking Time

The films and series of the Star Trek universe include both swans and turkeys. Overall Star Trek: Generations (1994) is a turkey, but it does contain some poignant dialogue about time, as when Dr. Soran remarks, “It's like a predator; it's stalking you. Oh, you can try and outrun it with doctors, medicines, new technologies. But in the end, time is going to hunt you down... and make the kill.” Other animals run from predators by instinct. Humans do too, but as the only creature fully aware of its own mortality our reasons for running have extra depth. Our awareness has motivated our obsession with time, which is always running out.
 
We live by the clock and the calendar. In a way we always have as the giant calendar that is Stonehenge attests, but the ancients nonetheless viewed and experienced time in different ways than modern folks. That applies to daily activities, yearly activities, and life courses, but also to their notions of deep time, such as whether it is linear or cyclical and whether the world has a beginning and an end (their etiology and eschatology). Time and Temporality in the Ancient World, edited by Ralph M. Rosen, is a title that caught my eye in E.R. Hamilton’s book catalogue in part because of my general interest in the subject and in part because for various reasons I’ve been feeling a bit ancient myself lately.
 

The book contains 9 scholarly articles about the experience and consideration of time in ancient Western and Eastern cultures. My primary caveat is that much of it is written in professor-ese. In the first entry, for example, the author defines “event” and “process” at length: “We can make the distinction between event and process because we are content to use time as the axis on which events are mapped and through which processes flow; time acts as our independent axis of measurement and definition.” He goes on like that for pages. I’m aware of the utility of defining one’s terms, but the meat of his article is perfectly well served by the normal Webster’s definition of those two words, which he only managed to obfuscate. Beneath the unfortunate prose, however, there are insights into the historical sense of the ancients in the Middle East, India, China, and Greece and the ways they tried to reconcile the clearly cyclical aspects of nature (seasons, astronomy) with an apparently uni-directional arrow of time from birth to death.
 
The Sumerians, credited with the first written language some 5000 years ago, had a sexagesimal (base 60) number system, which helps explain some aspects of their system of daily time that we continue to use today: 24 hours to a day, 60 minutes to an hour, 60 seconds to a minute. The curious thing about the last of those is that Sumerians did not have the ability to measure a second, but they defined the time interval anyway. They could only approximate a minute. To supplement naked-eye observations of the sun, moon, and stars, they had no more accurate mechanical timepiece than a water clock. In simplest form a water clock is just a leaky bowl that drips water at a constant rate. (Sand hourglasses didn’t come along until the 8^th century CE.) The Romans and Chinese later (and independently) developed far more complex water clocks with gears and escapements. They were notoriously inaccurate, but they still were useful on cloudy days and nights. They were recalibrated regularly to sundials, which themselves are inconstant due to the seasons.
 
The 7-day week also dates back to the Sumerians. It is the period of a waxing or waning moon (very nearly) and was associated with the seven known planets (the ancients regarded the sun and moon as planets) whose names (in English mostly with Nordic equivalents) still attach to the days today. Used extensively by astrologers, the 7-day week co-existed with 8-day market weeks and other divisions of months (e.g. ides and nones) well into the Roman era, eventually almost entirely prevailing in the 4^th century CE due to larger Biblical sway and the directives of Emperor Constantine. By this time the 7-day week was current in China as well (possibly via India where it was also current), again largely for astrological convenience.
 
Enumerating time was helpful in a host of practical ways, but practicality may not have been the initial impetus to do it. It might well have been a sense of mortality and the spiritual questions associated with it. The persistence of astrology alongside astronomy and timekeeping seems to argue for this. Grand cycles of time beyond normal human scales, but paralleling astronomical cycles, are common in Eastern, Western, and New World mythologies. So are notions of personal rebirths whether literally through reincarnation or into some afterlife. Ancient timekeepers I suspect felt the predator stalking them and sought some hope of escape hidden somewhere in the secrets of the celestial clock and in the large and small cycles of which they themselves were a part.
 
The personal experience of time has an odd duality in modern as in ancient times. We tend to live each day as though we have unlimited numbers of them even though each year seems to pass faster than the last. The effect shows up early. I remember back at the beginning of my junior year at George Washington University my friend Donald (hi Don, if you’re reading this) commenting, “I feel I’ve always been here [at college], and always will be here, but that I got here yesterday.” That isn’t the sort of time that can be measured by an atomic clock, but I knew what he meant. Unspoken but understood was that he (and I) would leave there tomorrow… and so, in a sense, we did. It reminds me of an old Henny Youngman joke: “Live each day as though it’s your last. One day you’ll be right.”
 
 

No one over 30 would ever write a song with this title.

That everyone in this clip (if still alive) is a senior citizen is explanation enough why.

The Rolling Stones – Time is on My Side